Understanding truth in terms of "correspondance" brings me noticeably closer to coding up an intelligent reasoner from scratch than those other words.
If the correspendence theory cannot handle maths or morals, you will end up with a reasoner that cannot handle maths or morals.
The simple truth is that brains are like maps, and true-ness of beliefs about reality is analogous to accuracy of maps about territory.
You need to show that that simple theory also deals with the hard cases....because EY didn't.
But it runs counter to a lot of bad philosophical thinking, which is why Eliezer bothered writing it.
It's a piece of bad thinking that runs counter to philosophy. You don't show that something works in all cases by pointing out, however loudly or exasperatedly, that it works in the easy cases ,where it is already well known to work.
Seems like first you objected that TST's lesson is meaningless, and now you're objecting that it's meaningful but limited and wrong. Worth noting that this isn't a back and forth argument about the same objection.
The rest of LW's epistemology sequences and meta-morality sequences explain why the foundations in TST also help understand math and morals.
If this has been discussed before, then I ask for patience, and a point in the right direction.
I have been a lurker on Lesswrong for a while, and have mostly just been reading things, and only commenting occasionally. It wasn't long before I realised that the sequences played a very important role for understanding lots of what goes on here.
I have been trying to read them, but I've been getting very frustrated. Apart from being insanely long, they are not very easy to understand.
Take the first one I came to "The Simple Truth".
It is a very long story, and it is never really explained what the point is. Is it that truth is whatever helps you to survive? If it is, that seems obviously false.
It also took me quite a while to realise that all these posts are written by one person, that struck me as a bit odd for a "community" blog. So couldn't there be some work to improve the sequences, while also making it more of a community effort?
Maybe:
* Some people could rewrite the key ones, and others could vote on them, or suggest changes
* There could be summary posts alongside the sequences listing the key claims
Any other suggestions?