James_Bach comments on No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 October 2007 05:24PM

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Comment author: James_Bach 07 October 2007 10:09:44PM 2 points [-]

Your point would be so much stronger, Eliezer, if you were allowed to ignore the role of models in rationality. But in all cases an infinity of alternative models may also account for what you think you have proven rationally. In your terms, no one can revoke the law that any belief in "accurate beliefs" rests on a priori assertions about what can exist and what constitutes evidence. It rests on a priori structures in your brain, designed to notice some things and not others.

Rationality is heuristic. In the case of waiting for water to spontaneously freeze at room temperature, it may be a marvelous heuristic not to hold your breath, but that's a straw man. What I'm worried about as a post-modern skeptic is what ways of organizing the world you and I have systematically failed to consider in our rational analyses. Because many internally consistent constructions of the world may be incommensurable, and yet lead not only to different predictions, but incommensurable predictions.

When you write about rationality as a way to defeat self-certainty, I'm excited and grateful. That's also how I use it. I'm more nervous when you write as if rationality is a tool that inevitably to accurate beliefs.