Oligopsony comments on Your Strength as a Rationalist - Less Wrong

69 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 August 2007 12:21AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 09 August 2010 07:39:10PM *  7 points [-]

Let's not get bogged down in the specific procedure of getting to Oz. My point was that if you truly adapt merely seeing something written somewhere as your standard for evidence, you commit yourself to analyzing and weighing the merits of EVERYTHING you read about EVERYWHERE.

No, you can acknowledge that something is evidence while also believing that it's arbitrarily weak. Let's not confuse the practical question of how strong evidence has to be before it becomes worth the effort to use it ("standard of evidence") with the epistemic question of what things are evidence at all. Something being written down, even in a fairy tale, is evidence for its truth; it's just many orders of magnitude short of the evidential strength necessary for us to consider it likely.

Comment author: Dpar 09 August 2010 07:53:50PM 0 points [-]

Vladimir, Cyan, and jimrandomh, since you essentially said the same thing, consider this reply to be addressed to all three of you.

Answer me honestly, when reading a fairy tale, do you really stop to consider what's written there, qualify its worth as evidence, and compare it to everything else you know that might contradict it, before making the decision that the probability of the fairy tale being true is extremely low? Do you really not just dismiss it offhand as not true without a second thought?

Comment author: Oligopsony 09 August 2010 08:00:05PM 2 points [-]

No, but only because that would be cognitively burdensome. We're boundedly rational.