Jiro comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - Less Wrong

6 Post author: adamzerner 05 September 2015 12:57AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (99)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Jiro 12 September 2015 04:07:11PM *  0 points [-]

I wouldn't be able to tell if someone is a good mathematician, but I'd know that if they add 2 and 2 the normal way and get 5, they're a bad one. It's often a lot easier to detect incompetence, or at least some kinds of incompetence, than excellence.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 September 2015 05:51:31PM *  0 points [-]

Is compartmentalisation supposed to be a competence or an incompetence, or neither?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2015 08:03:41PM -1 points [-]

Personally, I don't think "compartmentalization" actually cuts reality at the joints. Surely the brain must solve a classification problem at some point, but it could easily "fall out" that your algorithms simply perform better if they classify things or situations between contextualized models - that is, if they "compartmentalize" - than if they try to build one humongous super-model for all possible things and situations.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 13 September 2015 01:37:50PM 0 points [-]

But you don;t have proof of that theory, do you?

Comment author: [deleted] 14 September 2015 01:48:35PM -1 points [-]

Your original thesis would support that theory, actually.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 15 September 2015 10:40:33AM 0 points [-]

I havent made any object level claims about psychology.