SanguineEmpiricist comments on Intrapersonal comparisons: you might be doing it wrong. - Less Wrong

16 Post author: fowlertm 03 February 2015 09:34PM

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Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 20 February 2015 03:09:32AM 2 points [-]

"Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation."

Isaac Levi one of the founders of formal epistemology does something similar called "Mild Contractions". From the title of one of his books

"Mild Contraction: Evaluating Loss of Information Due to Loss of Belief". His epistemology constructed from decision theory is very advanced if not the most advanced.

http://www.amazon.com/Mild-Contraction-Evaluating-Information-Belief-ebook/dp/B00DZO8P4G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424401748&sr=1-1&keywords=mild+contraction

Comment author: fowlertm 21 February 2015 03:30:55PM *  1 point [-]

Interesting tie-in, thanks.

Incidentally, how cool would it be to be able to say "my epistemology is the most advanced"? If nothing else it'd probably be a great pickup line at LW meetups.