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eli_sennesh comments on The path of the rationalist - Less Wrong
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Before I also haven't heard anybody speak about taking those kinds of vows to oneself.
I consider basics to be important. If we allow vague statements about basic principles of rationality to stand we don't improve our understanding of rationality.
Willing is not the problem of motivated cognition. Having desires for reality to be different is not the problem. You don't need to be a straw vulcan without any desire or will to be rational.
Furthermore "Shut up and do the impossible" from the sequences is about "trying to will reality into being a certain way".
No, it's about actually finding the way to force reality into some state others considered so implausible that they hastily labeled it impossible. Saying, "If the probability isn't 0%, then to me it's as good as 100%!" isn't saying you can defy probability, but merely that you have a lot of information and compute-power. Or it might even just be expressing a lot of emotional confidence for someone else's sake.
(Or that you can solve your problems with giant robots, which is always the awesomer option.)
The sentence "trying to will reality into being a certain way". doesn't say anything about p=0 or defying probability.
This is what is known as "neglecting context". Right after the sentence you originally quoted from the article, we see this:
I'm not quite sure why you're having difficulty understanding this. "Willing reality into a being a certain way", in this context, does not mean desiring to change the world, but rather shifting one's probability estimates toward one's desired conclusion. For example, I have a strong preference that UFAI not be created. However, it would be a mistake for me to then assign a 0.00001% probability to the creation of UFAI purely because I don't want it to be created; the true probability is going to be higher than that. I might work harder to stop the creation of UFAI, which is what you mean by "willing reality", but that is clearly not the meaning the article is using.