learnmethis comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Great post! If this is the beginning of trend to make Less Wrong posts more accessible to a general audience, then I'm definitely a fan. There's a lot of people I'd love to share posts with who give up when they see a wall of text.
There are two key things here I think can be improved. I think they were probably skipped over for mostly narrative purposes and can be fixed with brief mentions or slight rephrasings:
In addition to comparison to external data such as experimental results, there are also critical insights on reality to be gained by armchair examination. For example, armchair examination of our own or others’ beliefs may lead us to realise that they are self-contradictory, and therefore that it is impossible for them to be true. No experimental results needed! This is extraordinarily common in mathematics, and also of great personal value in everyday thinking, since many cognitive mistakes lead directly to some form of internal contradiction.
It's better to say that the first statement is unsupported by the evidence and purely speculative. Here's one way that it could in fact be true: if our world is a simulation which destroys data points which won’t in any way impact the future observations of intelligent beings/systems. In fact, that’s an excellent optimisation over an entire class of possible simulations of universes. There would be no way for us to know this of course (the question is inherently undecideable) but it could still happen to be true. In fact, we can construct extremely simply toy universes for which this is true. Undecideability in general is a key consideration that seems missing from many Less Wrong articles, especially considering how frequently it pops up within any complex system.