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dlthomas comments on What is Evidence? - Less Wrong
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Great article, I have only this one comment:
"If your beliefs are entangled with reality, they should be contagious among honest folk."
Haven't true and false beliefs both proven to be contagious among honest folk? Just as we should not use a machine that beeps for all numbers as evidence for winning lottery numbers, we should not use whether or not a belief is contagious as evidence of its truth.
It depends on how likely the respective explanations are.
I think it depends on that, and only that, and should be completely disconnected from any social criteria such as "being contagious."
Also, Eliezer writes, "If your model of reality suggests that the outputs of your thought processes should not be contagious to others, then your model says that your beliefs are not themselves evidence, meaning they are not entangled with reality."
This seems false. Should LW thinkers take it as a problem that our methods are usually completely lost on, for example, fundamentalist scientologists? In fact, I don't think it's a stretch to claim that most people do not subscribe to LW methods, does that suggest a problem with LW methods? Do LW methods fail the test of being contagious and therefore fail the test of being reliable methods for acquiring evidence?