jdgalt comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 December 2011 06:01AM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 30 November 2011 11:11:08AM 4 points [-]

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you stock it with such furnature as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

-Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

Comment author: jdgalt 03 December 2011 01:43:01AM 2 points [-]

I'll bite: how am I supposed to judge (or predict) the usefulness of facts when I first see them, in time to avoid storing the useless ones?

I think the closest we get to this is that every time we remember something, we also edit that memory, thus (if we are rational enough) tossing out the useless or unreliable parts or at least flagging them as such. If this faculty worked better I might find it a convincing argument for "intelligent design," but the real thing, like so much else in human beings, is so haphazard that it reinforces my lack of belief in that idea.

Comment author: gwern 02 January 2012 02:25:40AM 1 point [-]

I don't think one necessarily edits the memory. Memories intrinsically decay over time; each recall is associated with a greater chance of being able to recall it in the future (memorization), with bonuses to spaced out recollections (spaced repetition) and optional userland hinting to the OS (going to sleep while expecting to be tested on something leads to greater retention for the same number of reviews).

In other words, the brain is a cache that implements Least Recently Used eviction.

Comment author: dlthomas 07 December 2011 07:06:11PM 0 points [-]

If this faculty worked better I might find it a convincing argument for "intelligent design,"

Why would you expect intelligent design to explain that very much better than evolution?

Comment author: wedrifid 07 December 2011 07:23:28PM *  3 points [-]

Why would you expect intelligent design to explain that very much better than evolution?

I think the reasoning is more along the lines that intelligent design is worse at explaining haphazard mush than it is at explaining well ordered things. As such an observation of well ordered things will result in a high weighting for intelligent design than an observation of haphazard mush in the same place simply because it must be discounted far less in the former case.

Comment author: dlthomas 07 December 2011 07:48:39PM 0 points [-]

Right, but that's only half the story... I wouldn't say it's zero evidence, but "convincing argument" seems far flung when there's plenty of reason for evolution to select for better use of our brain meats.

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