Fyrius comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alejandro1 03 August 2012 03:33PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 August 2012 12:04:05AM 5 points [-]

I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn't. If you have two meaningful statements - that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.

In other words, Bohr's maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, "I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math".

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 August 2012 03:35:36AM 6 points [-]

I don't really know what "profound" means here, but I usually take Bohr's maxim as a way of pointing out that when I encounter two statements, both of which seem true (e.g., they seem to support verified predictions about observations), which seem like opposites of one another, I have discovered a fault line in my thinking... either a case where I'm switching back and forth between two different and incompatible techniques for mapping English-language statements to predictions about observations, or a case for which my understanding of what it means for statements to be opposites is inadequate, or something else along those lines.

Mapping epistemological fault lines may not be profound, but I find it a useful thing to attend to. At the very least, I find it useful to be very careful about reasoning casually in proximity to them.