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ThrustVectoring comments on You only need faith in two things - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 March 2013 11:45PM

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Comment author: ThrustVectoring 11 March 2013 11:20:55AM 0 points [-]

I was at least familiar with the concepts involved and conflated mathematical induction and evidential inductive reasoning anyways.

Comment author: shminux 11 March 2013 04:25:31PM 4 points [-]

I can't even understand if the post is about pure math or about the applicability of certain mathematical models to the physical world.

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 11 March 2013 05:51:20PM 0 points [-]

From what I understand it's along the same lines as Bertrand Russel's search for the smallest set of axioms to form mathematics, except for everything and not just math.

Comment author: shminux 11 March 2013 06:16:01PM *  2 points [-]

except for everything and not just math.

If so, it makes little sense to me. Math is one tool for modeling and accurately predicting the physical world, and it is surely nice to minimize the number of axioms required to construct an accurate model, but it is still about the model, there is no well-ordering and no ordinals in the physical world, these are all logical constructs. It seems that there is something in EY's epistemology I missed.

being exposed to ordered sensory data will rapidly promote the hypothesis that induction works

...unless you are dealing with phenomena where it doesn't, like stock markets? Or is this a statement about the general predictability of the world, i.e. that models are useful? Then it is pretty vacuous, since otherwise what point would be there in trying to model the world?

there's some large ordinal that represents all the math you believe in.

"Believe" in what sense? That it is self-consistent? That it enables accurate modeling of physical systems?