entirelyuseless comments on Why Don't Rationalists Win? - LessWrong

6 Post author: adamzerner 05 September 2015 12:57AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 07 September 2015 02:22:04AM -2 points [-]

But normal human beings are extremely good at compartmentalization. In other words they are extremely good at knowing when knowing the truth is going to be useful for their goals, and when it is not. This means that they are better than Less Wrongers at attaining their goals, because the truth does not get in the way.

If you really believe this, I'd love to see a post on a computational theory of compartmentalization, so you can explain for us all how the brain performs this magical trick.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 07 September 2015 03:34:37AM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure what you mean by "magical trick." For example, it's pretty easy to know that it doesn't matter (for the brain's purposes) whether or not my politics is objectively correct or not; for those purposes it mainly matters whether I agree with my associates.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 September 2015 02:10:27PM 0 points [-]

it's pretty easy to know that it doesn't matter (for the brain's purposes) whether or not my politics is objectively correct or not

Bolded the part I consider controversial. If you haven't characterized what sort of inference problem the brain is actually solving, then you don't know the purposes behind its functionality. You only know what things feel like from the inside, and that's unreliable.

Hell, if normative theories of rationality were more computational and less focused on sounding intellectual, I'd believe in those a lot more thoroughly, too.