RichardKennaway 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: beoShaffer 04 October 2012 03:24:53AM *  3 points [-]

When I was trying to solve the koan I focused on a few interrelated subproblems of skill one. It seems like this sort of thinking is particularly useful for reminding yourself to consider the outside view and/or the difference between confidence levels inside and outside an argument.
Also, I think the koan left out something pretty important.
Under what circumstances, if any, is it harmful to consciously think of the distinction between the map and the territory - to visualize your thought bubble containing a belief, and a reality outside it, rather than just using your map to think about reality directly? How exactly does it hurt, on what sort of problem?

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It looks pretty solid for describing unbounded epistemic rationality. It's slightly iffier from a bounded instrumental perspective in that it probably imposes some mental cost to apply it and their are many circumstances were its not noticably helpful. There's also the matter of political situations and similar were its -arguably- good to be generally overconfident.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 October 2012 10:21:06AM 2 points [-]

Under what circumstances, if any, is it harmful to consciously think of the distinction between the map and the territory

If you can ever gain by being ignorant, you can gain more by better knowledge still.

Cf. E.T. Jaynes: "It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought", quoted here.