ME3 comments on Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
The metaphor can be made mathematically precise if we first make the analogy between human decision-making and optimization methods like simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. These optimization methods look for a locally optimal solution, but add some sort of "noise" term to try to find a globally optimal solution. So if we suppose that someone who wants to stay in his own local minimum has a lower "noise" temperature than someone who is open-minded, then the metaphor starts to make sense on a much more profound level.