thomblake comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (134)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 06 October 2012 11:50:26AM *  10 points [-]

"It's rational to believe the sky is blue" -> "I think the sky is blue" -> "The sky is blue"

These sentences have different truth conditions (sets of possible worlds in which they are true). For example, in a possible world where aliens have changed the color of the sky to green and installed filters into everyone's optic nerves, "I think the sky is blue" and "It's rational to believe (in the sense of assigning the most probability to) the sky is blue" are true but "the sky is blue" is false. In a possible world where I irrationally believe the sky is blue, "I think the sky is blue" is true but "It's rational to believe the sky is blue" is false.

I think I should pick the sentence that best matches the probability distribution over possible worlds that I have. For example if I'm pretty sure that it's rational to believe the sky is blue but not highly certain the sky really is blue, I might want to say "It's rational to believe the sky is blue". If I'm not sure about either, "I think the sky is blue" would be best, etc.

Comment author: thomblake 08 October 2012 06:34:46PM 1 point [-]

In a possible world where I irrationally believe the sky is blue, "I think the sky is blue" is true but "It's rational to believe the sky is blue" is false.

But in that possible world, you could just as well say "I think the sky is blue" and "It's rational to believe the sky is blue" and "The sky is blue". You shouldn't find yourself in the situation of saying "I believe that the sky is blue, but the sky is not actually blue".