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Dagon comments on A rational unfalsifyable believe - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
By human-granularity, I mean beliefs about macro states that can be analyzed and manipulated by human thought and expressed in reasonable amounts (say, less than a few hundred pages of text) of human language. As contrasted with pure analytic beliefs about the state of the universe expressed numerically.
For instrumental rationality, what goals are furthered by her knowing the truth of this fact? Presuming that if Adam is innocent, she wants to believe that Adam is innocent and if Adam is guilty, she wants to believe Adam is guilty, why does she want to be correct (beyond "I like being right")? What decision will she make based on it?
I think that's it. "I like knowing that the person I love is innocent." Which implies that Adam is not lying to her and "I like being in healthy, fulfilling and genuine marital relationship"
That's a reason to want him to be innocent, not a reason to want to know the truth. What's her motivation for the necessary second part of the litany: "if Adam is guilty, I want to believe that Adam is guilty"?
"If Adam is guilty, then the relationship was not genuine." Am I on the right track? or did I misunderstood your question?
That just moves it up a level. If she is rational, she'll say "if our relationship was genuine, I want to believe it was genuine. If our relationship was not genuine, I want to believe it was not genuine".
The OP and most of the discussion has missed the fundamental premise of rationality: truth-seeking. The question is not "is Eve rational", but "is Eve's belief (including acknowledgement of uncertainty) correct"?