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buybuydandavis comments on Collaborative Truth-Seeking - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
To be fully rational is to orient toward winning.
Me, I'm not fully rational. I'm a moron. I typically do what you suggest instead - orienting toward truth (epistemic truth). It's taken me decades to realize the foolishness of that, but it is still my natural inclination.
-- Recovering Truthaholic
I agree that there are definitely situations where orienting toward the truth is not winning, although they are rare. The technique here is specifically for use in the vast majority of situations when orienting toward the truth is optimal.
Keep in mind that "winning" has a specific meaning here that's different from the colloquial. It doesn't mean winning debates or winning contests, it means guiding your experiences to the world-state you prefer. And if this isn't pretty deeply tied to truth-seeking, you probably have pretty trivial terminal goals.
What does this mean? The straightforward interpretation is "reshape the world to your liking".
Counterexample: election debates.
In general, sometimes you want to figure out the truth, but sometimes you need to remove roadblocks. In the latter case winning doesn't have much to do with truth-seeking and that does not imply the triviality of the terminal goals.
Uhm... you still need to know what truly persuade potential electors. In a formula:
truth-seeking =/= truth-telling
Yes, but you don't find it in a debate with your opponent.
There is time to figure out what to do, and there is time to just do it.
is a fair restatement, but doesn't capture MWI and my model of decisions as anthropic measurement rather than universe mutation. Everything possible actually happens; your choices are just a selector/cause of which timeline your observer finds itself in.
Figuring out the truth of election outcomes (your expected experiences conditional on different actions you take and the outcomes that occur) seems fairly important to me. My current estimate on the topic is that my debating or voting will have almost no impact on my future experiences. And getting correction and updates if that is NOT true would be extremely valuable.
This statement is vague, but if you mean something broad (i.e. all that you can imagine and more), I certainly don't think this is a consequence of MWI.
Maybe I don't know something, but the statement that "everything possible actually happens" seems to me like a collation between MWI and fairy tales/poor science fiction.
Please correct me if it's me who is ignorant.
Do you claim that accepting MWI is a necessary part of rationality and/or do you claim that there is empirical difference between an MWI world and a Copenhagen world?
I should have been more clear: I meant debates between candidates, e.g. debates between candidates for the presidency of the United States. Clearly you want to win such a debate rather than truth-seek, and clearly your goals aren't exactly trivial.
Sorry to bring in MWI - it is how I model actions and decisions, but it's not necessary to the conversation.
Agreed, and I was unclear above. Many times you want to "win" by convincing people to follow you, even if you are encouraging untruth in them. You still benefit by knowing the truth, as it will help you manipulate them. I'd argue that this drifts from rationality to ethics pretty quickly, but you're absolutely right: the point of debate may not be rational truth-seeking in the first place.
Very droll.
But define winning. In many situations, finding the truth is winning.
For example take global warming. Maybe I'm lobbyist for big oil and for me winning means making sure no one takes global warming seriously. But even then knowing the facts is still in my interest. So if I'm amongst fellow lobbyists who I trust it is in my interest to take an open, truth seeking approach. This will help me identify the strong and weak points in my opponents' arguments. It will help in formulating distractionary strategies. Etc. I will just have to make sure no one records the meeting and then leaks it.