Vladimir_Nesov comments on Philosophical Landmines - Less Wrong

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 08 February 2013 07:51:10PM 8 points [-]

"Outside view" refers to some threshold of reliability in the details that you keep in a description of a situation. If you throw out all relevant detail, "outside view" won't be able to tell you anything. If you keep too much detail, "outside view" won't be different from the inside view (i.e. normal evaluation of the situation that doesn't invoke this tool). Thus, the decision about which details to keep is important and often non-trivial, in which case simply appealing to something not being "outside view" is not helpful.

Comment author: Jack 08 February 2013 08:14:22PM 4 points [-]

I took it to be obvious that "taking the outside view" in the grandparent comment meant dropping the detail that 'Nyan and everyone here thinks his cached thoughts are better than his sisters' and so Qiaochu_Yuan's reply was not answering the question.