Dmytry comments on On accepting an argument if you have limited computational power. - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Dmytry 11 January 2012 05:07PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (85)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: cousin_it 11 January 2012 05:30:31PM 7 points [-]

Your first point seems interesting. How specifically should we go about structuring arguments to make flaws easy to find?

Comment author: Dmytry 12 January 2012 09:07:48PM 3 points [-]

Well, one important thing to avoid is the type of argument that requires massive exhaustive search through a vast space to find a flaw. It can be perhaps escaped by declaring such arguments void unless the full exhaustive search has been performed by a computer.

I had some thoughts for the models. An argument based on the imperfect model of real world should outline imperfections of the model and then propagate the imperfections along with the chain of reasoning, as to provide upper bound on the final error. It is often done with computer simulations of e.g. atmosphere, where you can e.g. run simulation a lot of times with different values that are within the error range and look at the spread of the outcome.