Jef_Allbright comments on Dark Side Epistemology - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 October 2008 11:55PM

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

Comments (110)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Jef_Allbright 18 October 2008 01:43:33PM 0 points [-]

I'm in strong agreement with Peter's examples above. I would generalize by saying that the epistemic "dark side" tends to arise whenever there's an implicit discounting of the importance of increasing context. In other words, whenever, for the sake of expediency, "the truth", "the right", "the good". etc., is treated categorically rather than contextually (or equivalently, as if the context were fixed or fully specified.)