MattG comments on Robert Aumann on Judaism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (60)
It's not a bias, but an expected-value calculation. Most falsehoods are utterly useless to believe, along the lines of "The moon is made of green cheese." Merely affecting a belief-in-belief can be useful for the vast majority of other cases without actually spoiling your own reasoning abilities by swallowing a poison pill of deliberate falsehood in the name of utility.
The issue is that without possessing complete information about your environment, you can't actually tell, a priori, which false beliefs are harmless and which ones will lose and lose badly.
When you have a sophisticated meta-level argument for object-level wrongness, you're losing.
Agreed. This is what I was saying about compartmentalization.