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Grognor comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: Grognor 04 July 2012 03:51:20AM *  1 point [-]

Any belief that I can never be talked out of (given how the human mind works, probably most beliefs we have are like this actually)

I suspect that with enough resources you could be talked out of any of your beliefs. Oh, sure, it would take a lot of time, planning, and manpower (and probably some people you approve of having the beliefs we'd want to indoctrinate you with). You're not actually 100% certain that you're 100% certain that 0 and 1 are probabilities.

The trouble with thinking 0 or 1 is a probability is that it is exactly equivalent to having an infinite amount of evidence, which is impossible by the laws of thermodynamics; minds exist within physics.

Furthermore, a feeling of absolute certainty isn't even a number, much less a probability.

Comment author: Kindly 04 July 2012 07:13:48PM *  1 point [-]

I suspect that with enough resources you could be talked out of any of your beliefs.

At some point you have to ask: who is this "me" that can have any arbitrary collection of beliefs?

(And yes, incidentally, I don't assign 100% probability to the fact that I assign 100% probability to the statement "0 and 1 are probabilities." I think I could be persuaded, not to have a lower confidence in the 0-1 statement, but to believe that my confidence in it is lower than it is. This is sort of hard to think about, though.)