CronoDAS comments on A Dialogue On Doublethink - Less Wrong

52 Post author: BrienneYudkowsky 11 May 2014 07:38PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 08 May 2014 08:42:17AM 3 points [-]

It's not that hard to accidentally believe a contradiction, since we're not logically omniscient and "consistency checking" is a computationally intractable problem except in simple cases. Proving that an arbitrary sentence of propositional logic isn't a contradiction is an NP-complete problem, and human beliefs are more complicated than statements in propositional logic.

Comment author: brazil84 09 May 2014 11:45:19PM 2 points [-]

It's not that hard to accidentally believe a contradiction, since we're not logically omniscient and "consistency checking" is a computationally intractable problem except in simple cases.

I agree with you in theory, but in practice there are plenty of contradictions which are pretty darned obvious. i.e. the limiting factor in human rationality seems to be the human tendency to self-deception and hypocrisy. As opposed to the computational difficulty of finding contradictions.