Annoyance comments on The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice - Less Wrong

44 Post author: AnnaSalamon 05 March 2009 04:28AM

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Comment author: Annoyance 05 March 2009 06:50:53PM 3 points [-]

We can think of cholera transmission (or actually, any memetic spread) as consisting of a feedback loop.

There are positive and negative feedback loops, depending on what properties we're examining: positive loops lead to a greater and greater value of the property, while negative loops converge on some set value.

Ideally we want to set up our mental environments so that error is trapped in negative feedback loops and reduced as much as possible, while correctness is amplified. In terms of assigned probability, wrongness should go to zero and correctness to one.

The methods for bringing this about are widely known but, oddly, not widely recognized and even less widely applied. They're called logic.