Rationality Quotes November 2012

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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

But if my (not a mathematician) friend says that god spoke to him in a dream, and gave him a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, and he has the proof and it's valid, then I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.

But then that doesn't hold up to any decent Bayesian probabilistic analysis.

When you trace the chain of causality for why they thought it was "God" that spoke to them in the first place, you find that they use very vague heuristics for identifying speakers-in-dreams as "God" as opposed to "Some Mathematically-genius Alien", and then that the source of those heuristics is even more vague and unlikely to be accurate: Biblical readings, inferences from the bible, third-hand accounts from some person who listened to some priest w... (read more)

2Abd14y

What I've observed in myself about reports of "God" doing something I'll describe as "insufficient curiosity." I have frequently not asked how the person identified the source as "God." White beard, what? No, I've assumed, way too easily, that their actual experience doesn't matter. And this could also be quite interesting if the person is a mathematician. Depends on what is more important to us, solving the unsolved math problem, and perhaps understanding heuristics, or coming up with evidence that something unexpected is going on. Can't explain it? Goddidit. Q.E.D.

8gwern14y

But then the dream is doing zero work: your friend could simply say God told him the proof of the conjecture, and your situation is the same - if the proof checks out then you need to compare base rate for gods delivering math proofs and your friend secretly having a hobby of being a mathematician and succeeding etc to see whether it changes your beliefs. And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God's previous statements were doing.

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Rationality Quotes November 2012

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