buybuydandavis 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: buybuydandavis 29 October 2011 08:05:24AM *  0 points [-]

This is the peculiar blindness of rationalists. Everywhere you look, you can see people denying reality, and yet rationalists talk like it can't be done.

Winston, after being tortured, eventually could see 5 fingers where there were only 4. Most people are much more malleable than that. They already had a preference for believing what they're told to believe. You can see it everywhere you look.

Even if you ignore the daily evidence of your senses, just as a matter of the evolutionary pressure of centuries of ideological terror and executions, shouldn't we expect independents minds to have gone the way of the dodo?

Is it impossible for us to change our spots? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we just aren't rational enough yet, still fetishistically clinging to our mania for epistemic rationality, ignoring the tradeoffs we make to instrumental rationality, which is where the rubber meets the road.

Second order rationality implies...

No it doesn't. As long as one includes instrumental rationality in the mix, it implies nothing of the sort. Instrumental rationality is what achieves your values. If you're really committed to winning, not just toeing the line on epistemic rationality, you can and will probably change. Your mind can calculate a lot more than what you can bat around in your head self consciously.

Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

That isn't the thought that defeats me, nor is it the thought that defeats Orwell. The horror is that Double Think may win, and may already be winning.

I find it grotesque, but the universes seems blithely unconcerned about my preferences.