shokwave comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 08:05PM

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Comment author: shokwave 08 December 2010 03:30:11PM 0 points [-]

I was always under the impression that a sort of "work" can lead you to emotionally believe things that you already know to be true in principle.

I strongly associate this with Eliezer's description of the brain as a cognitive engine, that needs to a certain amount of thermodynamical work to arrive at a certainty level - and that reasoned and logical conclusions that you 'know' fail to produce belief (enough certainty to act on knowledge) because they don't make your brain do enough work.

I imagine that forcing someone to deduce bits of probability math from earlier principles and observations, then have them use it to analyze betting games until they can generalise to concepts like expected value, would be enough work to have them believe probability theory.