Kaj_Sotala comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 October 2012 10:05:11AM 0 points [-]

This time, I wrote down my answer to the koan: the basic idea was correct, but there weren't as many examples of subskills as Eliezer listed.

It helps to realize that there may be mistakes in the process of constructing a map, and that you may need to correct them. If there is a problem where it's important to be right, like when figuring out whether you should invest in a company, or if you are feeling bad about your life and wonder whether it's justified, you need to be able to make the map-territory distinction in order to evaluate the accuracy of your beliefs.

Though I'm somewhat pleased in that I don't, at least, remember Eliezer ever explicitly making the jump from beliefs to emotions and applying "are your emotions correct" as a special case of "the map is not the territory"; I can't claim that to be original to me (I think I might have gotten it from Jasen Murray or Michael Vassar or some book), but at least I've helped popularize it on LW somewhat.