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Vulture comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 - Less Wrong
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-- C. S. Lewis
This seems obviously false. Am I missing something?
I think that C.S. Lewis means that when a person puts forth an assertion, you should ascertain the truth of falsity of the assertion by examining the assertion alone; the mental state of the person making the assertion is irrelevant.
Presumably Lewis is arguing against the genetic fallacy, or more specifically, Bulverism.
Edit: Why the downvote? My comment was fairly non-controversial (I thought).
Whether a belief is wishful thinking is inherently an assertion about the mental state of a person. It is meaningless to say that you should examine the assertion instead of the mental state, since the assertion is an assertion about the mental state.
I don't know about that. Merriam Webster defines wishful thinking as:
So if my calculations are accurate, per Merriam Webster's definition, I have not engaged in wishful thinking.
Something can be wishful thinking and true at the same time. Doing the sum wouldn't prove that it's not wishful thinking.
Of course having the sum be correct is a necessary condition for non-wishful thinking, but it does not determine the existence of non-wishful-thinking all by itself.
No it's not. You can be wrong for reasons other than wishful thinking.
When A is being correct and B is wishful thinking, what I said is that A implies B, which reduces to (B || ~A). What you're saying is that ~A does not imply ~B, which reduces to (B && ~A). Of course, these two statements are compatible.
I think you messed up there. Being correct certainly doesn't imply wishful thinking. You were saying that non-wishful thinking implies being correct. That is ~B implies A. Or ~A implies B, which is equivalent.
If I checked my balance and due to some bank error was told that I had a large balance, I would probably have the sum be incorrect but still be using non-wishful thinking. The sum being correct is not a necessary condition for non-wishful thinking. All the other combinations are possible as well, though I don't feel like going through all the examples.
You're right, I meant to say that B implies A, not to say that A implies B. However, that is still equivalent to (B || ~A) so the rest, and the conclusion, still follow.
B implies A would be wishful thinking implies that you are correct. This is obviously false. You clearly intended to have a not in there somewhere. Double check your definitions.
I was giving an example of (~A && ~B). If you want an example of (A && B), it would be that I don't even look at my statements and just assume that I have tons of money because that would be awesome, but I also just happen to have lots of money.
It being a law of the Internet that corrections usually contain at least one error, that applies to my own corrections too. In this case the error is the definitions of A and B.
A=being correct, B=non-wishful-thinking.
"Having the sum be correct is a necessary condition for non-wishful thinking" means B implies A, which in turn is equivalent to (B || ~A).
"You can be wrong for reasons other than wishful thinking" means ~(~B implies ~A), which is equivalent to ~(~B || A), which is equivalent to B && ~A.
Same conclusions as before, and they're still not inconsistent.
Now that we have that out of the way, we can start communicating.
A counterexample to (B || ~A) would be (~B && A), so wishful thinking while still being correct. As I said in my last post, you just assume you have a lot of money because it would be awesome, and by complete coincidence, you actually do have a lot of money.
Now that we have established the language correctly and I looked through my first post again, you are correct and I misread it. I tried to go back and count through all the mistakes that lead to our mutual confusion, and I just couldn't do it. We have layers of mistakes explaining each others mistakes.