If this has been discussed before, then I ask for patience, and a point in the right direction.
I have been a lurker on Lesswrong for a while, and have mostly just been reading things, and only commenting occasionally. It wasn't long before I realised that the sequences played a very important role for understanding lots of what goes on here.
I have been trying to read them, but I've been getting very frustrated. Apart from being insanely long, they are not very easy to understand.
Take the first one I came to "The Simple Truth".
It is a very long story, and it is never really explained what the point is. Is it that truth is whatever helps you to survive? If it is, that seems obviously false.
It also took me quite a while to realise that all these posts are written by one person, that struck me as a bit odd for a "community" blog. So couldn't there be some work to improve the sequences, while also making it more of a community effort?
Maybe:
* Some people could rewrite the key ones, and others could vote on them, or suggest changes
* There could be summary posts alongside the sequences listing the key claims
Any other suggestions?
Everything is reality, so that is a distinction that doesn't make a difference. All illusions and errors are produced by real processes. (Or is "reality" being used to mean "external reality").
Sometimes. But being reality controlled isn't a good criterion for when, since it is never false.
They are perfomed by real brains. if "reality controlled" just means producing the right results, the whole argument is circular.
Why is it important to taboot the words "accurate", "correct", "represent", "reflect", "semantic", "believe", "knowledge", "map", or "real"., but not the word "correspond"?
By "reality-controlled", I don't just mean "external reality", I mean the part of external reality that your belief claims to be about.
Understanding truth in terms of "correspondance" brings me noticeably closer to coding up an intelligent reasoner from scratch than those other words.
The simple truth is that brains are like maps, and true-ness of beliefs about reality is analogous to accuracy of maps about territory. This sounds super obvious, which is why Eliezer called it "The Simple Truth". But it runs counter to a lot of bad philosophical thinking, which is why Eliezer bothered writing it.