TheAncientGeek 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: TheAncientGeek 19 September 2015 07:50:51AM 1 point [-]

If you have some some sort of distributed database with multiple updates from multiple sources, its likely to get into an inconsistent state unless you to measures to prevent that. So the way to achieve the magic of compartmentalised "beliefs" is to build a system like that, but don't bother to add a consistency layer.