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pedanterrific comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: FAWS 18 April 2012 02:30AM

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Comment author: pedanterrific 22 April 2012 07:10:56AM 2 points [-]

This should cause you to update down your view of Aumann's Agreement theorem.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm having trouble parsing "update down your view of".

Comment author: Vaniver 22 April 2012 07:25:48AM 7 points [-]

Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm having trouble parsing "update down your view of".

Aumann's Agreement theorem is a neat true result about fictional entities. Its applicability to real entities is subjective, and based on how close you think the real entities are to the fictional entities. Increasing that distance makes AAT less relevant to how you live your life, and increasing that distance is what I mean by "update down your view of."

My feeling is that those entities are really distant, to the point where AAT should not seriously alter your beliefs. "I trusted X because Y trusted X" is a recipe for disaster if you trust Y because of different domain-specific competence, rather than their deep knowledge of X.

Comment author: pedanterrific 22 April 2012 07:57:30AM *  5 points [-]

Right, ok. I'd already thought that AAT is essentially irrelevant to actual human behavior, so I was confused what brought it up.

ETA: No idea why you were downvoted so far.