army1987 comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: GDC3 06 October 2012 06:52:28PM 21 points [-]

Specifically they're different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say "X" when you expect your conversation partner to say something like "oh cool, I didn't know that." You say "I believe X" when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. "It's true that X" is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as a belief and you want to state it as a fact.

A: "I hear that lots of people are saying the sky is blue." B: "The sky is blue."

The above sounds weird. (Unless you are imagining it with emphasis on "is" which is another way to put emphasis on the truth of the proposition.) "The sky is blue" is being stated without signaling its relationship to the previous conversation so it sounds like new information; A will expect some new proposition and be briefly confused; it sounds like echolalia rather than an answer.

B: "The sky really is blue.

or

B: "It's actually true that the sky is blue."

sounds better in this context.

Comment author: CronoDAS 06 October 2012 08:23:20PM 6 points [-]

That's a better explanation than I could come up with.

On a completely irrelevant note, why is "the sky is blue" the standard for "obviously true fact"? The sky is black about half the time, and it's pretty common for it to be white, too.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 October 2012 08:53:49AM 1 point [-]

The sky is black about half the time

If you count navy as blue rather than as black, that happens more rarely than “half the time”. (I'd say “10% of the time” as I have that number cached in my mind as the duty cycle of fluorescence detectors for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.) You know, the moon.

and it's pretty common for it to be white, too.

And when that happens, in places where electric lighting is widely used, it tends to become orange (not quite -- does that colour have a name?) during the night!

Comment author: pure-awesome 10 April 2013 08:17:45PM 0 points [-]

I believe CronoDAS was referring to overcast days when they said the sky is sometimes white.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 April 2013 08:29:31PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, I was talking about his claim that “the sky is black about half the time”; I didn't touch his claim that “it's pretty common for it to be white”.

EDIT: Okay, failed reading comprehension of my own comment.