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Stabilizer comments on Aliveness in Training - Less Wrong
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How is aliveness different from "make beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience"?
Aliveness is making beliefs pay rent in actual experience.
One could turn that around and say that the process of anticipation needs to pay its rent.
Aliveness just seems to be beliefs-paying-rent on a meta-level.
A belief in the invisible garage dragon pays no rent: You don't anticipate anything. A belief that you can disarm someone holding a gun on you pays rent: You anticipate that if someone aims a gun at you, you'll be fine. A belief paying rent is not in principle relevant to whether or not it's true, though it does open it up to falsification.
Aliveness is a training paradigm designed to help create useful skills and ensure your beliefs about what those skills can do are accurate; making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience is a technique for ensuring that your beliefs are meaningful.
Still not sure what the difference is.
For example, your beliefs may be meaningful but false because in training, you did not have accurate feedback while developing the skills that you use to form beliefs. Making beliefs pay rent is an example of a skill (or in this case, a habit) that is used to avoid meaningless beliefs. When you are training a skill like, say, calibration, it is important to have tight, realistic feedback loops on both your beliefs and the anticipated experiences they predict. Without the former, you will be anticipating correctly according to your beliefs without properly demonstrating the other skill you are training.
It's not obvious to me (with my rationalist hat on) how a belief may be false but meaningful.
I'm sorry to have such terse replies, but it's as simple as that.
I could believe that my 'O' and 'P' keys have been swapped, and thus anticipate that pressing my 'O' key will result in a 'P' and vice versa. This belief is clearly meaningful-- it means something-- but it also happens to be false. It passes the making beliefs pay rent test-- but that isn't a test for whether or not something is true.
Um, ok, one of us is using extremely nonstandard terminology without realizing it, and I don't think it's me. Take an example: "the earth is the closest planet to the sun". This belief is obviously false, but seems perfectly meaningful. Would you describe it as false and meaningless?
a belief in a celestial teapot is meaningless because it doesn't matter whether it's false or not: you have no evidence and no reasonable way of gaining evidence. Claiming to believe in it is just a waste of cognitive resources. A belief in, for example, the door opening inward or outward is meaningful: It will directly impact the action you take when you come to the door. This is regardless of whether the belief is false, and you push a pull door or the belief is true and you correctly pull the pull door.