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[SEQ RERUN] The Proper Use of Humility
Today's post, The Proper Use of Humility was originally published on 1 December 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
There are good and bad kinds of humility. Proper humility is not being selectively underconfident about uncomfortable truths. Proper humility is not the same as social modesty, which can be an excuse for not even trying to be right. Proper scientific humility means not just acknowledging one's uncertainty with words, but taking specific actions to plan for the case that one is wrong.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was ...What's a bias, again? and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
What is Evidence?
"The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white."
—Alfred Tarski
"To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true."
—Aristotle, Metaphysics IV
If these two quotes don't seem like a sufficient definition of "truth", read this. Today I'm going to talk about "evidence". (I also intend to discuss beliefs-of-fact, not emotions or morality, as distinguished here.)
Walking along the street, your shoelaces come untied. Shortly thereafter, for some odd reason, you start believing your shoelaces are untied. Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace. There is a sequence of events, a chain of cause and effect, within the world and your brain, by which you end up believing what you believe. The final outcome of the process is a state of mind which mirrors the state of your actual shoelaces.
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