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?
I think you can somewhat rescue the correspondence theory for math by combining claims like "this math is true" with claims like "this part of reality is well modeled by this math" to create factual claims. That approach should be enough for decision making. And you can mostly rescue the correspondence theory for morals by translating claims like "X is better than Y" into factual claims like "my algorithm prefers X to Y", since we have some idea of how algorithms might have preferences (to the extent they approximate vNM or something). I agree that both areas have unsolved mysteries, though.
Then you would have some other form of truth in place before you started considering what true maths corresponds to. Which may be what you mean by somewhat rescue...embed correspondence as a one component of a complex theory. But no one is really saying that correspodence is 100% wrong, the debate is more about whether a simple the... (read more)