Will_Pearson comments on Crisis of Faith - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2008 10:08PM

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Comment author: Will_Pearson 12 October 2008 03:14:00PM -1 points [-]

I am better off (in most circumstances) if deluding myself to believe that the weather in Maine on the 23rd of June 1865 was near what I think the seasonal average might be, for that decade, rather than memorising the exact temperature and rainfall if it was presented to me.

I believe this is true for most people, apart from climatologists.

I would be rather not be around people who kept telling me true minutiae about the world and he cosmos, if they have no bearing on the problems I am trying to solve.

Am I justified in giving people a guess of the average temp, if someone had told me earlier what the exact temp was? Yes, if I didn't discard data, even assuming I had a 100% truth detector, people could quite easily DOS me by truth flooding me, over running my memory buffers and preventing me from doing useful things.

There are an extremely high number of truths, some more valuable than others.

There is no way you can differentiate externally between someone telling a lie and someone forgetting. It has the exact same consequence, people will give less accurate information than they could have done.