Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Proper Use of Doubt - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2007 08:29PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (30)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2007 10:35:06PM 3 points [-]

Good point, conchis. By "doubt" I don't mean assigning a probability unequal to 1 - all probabilities are like that, in my book. If I'm pretty sure that a coinflip is fair, I don't say I "doubt" whether the result will be heads or tails - it doesn't feel the same as doubting whether it's possible to revive a cryonics patient.

It seems to me that the word "doubt" could refer to two different things. First, it could be descriptive, an emotion that human beings sometimes feel, for example what kids feel when they start to wonder whether Santa Claus really exists. Second, "doubt" could have a pure mathematical meaning: an ideal Bayesian seeing a probabilistic opportunity to destroy a belief (downgrade its probability) by following a path of investigation. A human rationalist's Type-1 'doubts' should also qualify as Type-2 'doubts'.

HA, what do you mean by "transparency"?