= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Armok_GoB comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (353)
Tangential: I keep not understanding counterfactuals intuitively, not because of the usual reason, but simply because if I take my best model of the past and rerun it towardsthe future I do not arive at the present due to stochastic and chaos elevents.
Aka, trying to do the standard math: I throw a 100 sided dice, it comes out 73, "If 2+2 were equal to 4, the dice would with 99% certainty have come out 73".
The statement is true, but because making a statement in a conversation is normally taken to have a point, nobody would ever say such a thing. If it rings false to your ears, that's your social instincts rightly warning you that making such a statement would be likely to deceive someone.
Compare: my super-smart friend is studying for a test. I know he'll ace it no matter what. I wouldn't tell him "if you go to bed now and get some sleep you'll ace it tomorrow", and I wouldn't tell him "if you study all night you'll ace it", despite both of those being true. In either case he would think the first part of my statement was relevant.
Then how can anyone meaningfully talk about "what would have happened if X had happened instead of Y, Z years ago", when there'd be billions of changes due to randomness vastly larger than the kind of things humans tend to respond to that type of question with, completely drowning them out?
But this is because the purpose of saying the above isn't merely to inform your friend of a true statement — it's to convince him to get a good night's sleep, in order to cause him to be well and happy.
It's not just that. See also Section 5 of this chapter of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.