MugaSofer comments on The Fallacy of Gray - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 January 2008 06:24AM

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Comment author: MugaSofer 10 January 2013 10:26:53AM *  -2 points [-]

If your point instead is that probabilities will result in the right answer more often then not, fine, then accurately identifying the proper inputs and valuing them correctly is of utmost importance -- this is simply not practical in many situations precisely because the world is so complex.

Indeed. One of the purposes of this site is to help people become more rational - closer to a mathematical perfect reasoner - in everyday life. In math problems, however - and every real problem can, eventually, be reduced to a math problem - we can always make the right choice (unless we make a mistake with the math, which does happen.)

I think I'm the only one on LessWrong that finds EY's writing maddening -- mostly the style -- I keep screaming to myself, "get to the point!" -- as noted, perhaps its just me.

Unfortunately for you, most of the basic introductory-level stuff - and much of the really good stuff generally - is by him. So I'm guessing there's a certain selection effect for people who enjoy/tolerate his style of writing.

His examples from the cited article miss the point of perspectivism I think. Perspectivism (or at least how I am using it) simply means that truth can be relative, not that it is relative in all cases. Rationality does not seem to account for the possibility that it could be relative in any case.

I'm still not sure how truth could be "relative" - could you perhaps expand on what you mean by that? - although obviously it can be obscured by biases and simple lack of data. In addition, some questions may actually have no answer, because people are using different meanings for the same word or the question itself is contradictory (how many sides does a square triangle have?)

EDIT:

In those cases, I think rationality falls short, and the attempt to assign probabilities can give false confidence that the derived answer has a greater value than simply providing confidence that it is the best one.

A lot of people here - myself included - practice or advise testing how accurate your estimates are. There are websites and such dedicated to helping people do this.