shokwave comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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

Comments (513)

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

Comment author: shokwave 04 October 2012 06:23:53PM 1 point [-]

I take "consistent" to mean roughly "does not contain a contradiction", so "a belief that is consistent with reality" would mean something like "if you take all of reality as a collection of facts, and then add this belief, as a fact, to that collection, the collection won't contain a contradiction." It seems to me, if this is a fair representation of the concept, that some beliefs about the future are consistent with reality, but false. For example:

Humanity will be mining asteroids in 2024.

This is consistent with reality: there is at least one company talking about it, there are no obvious impossibilities (there are barriers, but we recognise they can be overcome with engineering)... but it's very probably false.