After having it recommended to me for the fifth time, I finally read through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It didn't seem like it'd be interesting to me, but I was really mistaken. It's fantastic.

One thing I noticed is that Harry threatens people a lot. My initial reaction was, "Nahh, that wouldn't work."

It wasn't to scrutinize my own experience. It wasn't to do a google search if there's literature available. It wasn't to ask a few friends what their experiences were like and compare them.

After further thought, I came to realization - almost every time I've threatened someone (which is rarely), it's worked. Now, I'm kind of tempted to write that off as "well, I had the moral high ground in each of those cases" - but:

1. Harry usually or always has the moral high ground when he threatens people in MOR.

2. I don't have any personal anecdotes or data about threatening people from a non-moral high ground, but history provides a number of examples, and the threats often work.

This gets me to thinking - "Huh, why did I write that off so fast as not accurate?" And I think the answer is because I don't want the world to work like that. I don't want threatening people to be an effective way of communicating.

It's just... not a nice idea.

And then I stop, and think. The world is as it is, not as I think it ought to be.

And going further, this makes me consider all the times I've tried to explain something I understood to someone, but where they didn't like the answer. Saying things like, "People don't care about your product features, they care about what benefit they'll derive in their own life... your engineering here is impressive, but 99% of people don't care that you just did an amazing engineering feat for the first time in history if you can't explain the benefit to them."

Of course, highly technical people hate that, and tend not to adjust.

Or explaining to someone how clothing is a tool that changes people's perceptions of you, and by studying the basics of fashion and aesthetics, you can achieve more of your aims in life. Yes, it shouldn't be like that in an ideal world. But we're not in that ideal world - fashion and aesthetics matter and people react to it.

I used to rebel against that until I wizened up, studied a little fashion and aesthetics, and started dressing to produce outcomes. So I ask, what's my goal here? Okay, what kind of first impression furthers that goal? Okay, what kind of clothing helps make that first impression?

Then I wear that clothing.

And yet, when confronted with something I don't like - I dismiss it out of hand, without even considering my own past experiences. I think this is incredibly common. "Nahh, that wouldn't work" - because the person doesn't want to live in a world where it would work.

"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.

Related to: Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn’t) help

I've been compiling a list of the top things I’ve learned from Less Wrong in the past few months. If you’re new here or haven’t been here since the beginning of this blog, perhaps my personal experience from reading the back-log of articles known as the sequences can introduce you to some of the more useful insights you might get from reading and using Less Wrong.

1. Things can be correct - Seriously, I forgot. For the past ten years or so, I politely agreed with the “deeply wise” convention that truth could never really be determined or that it might not really exist or that if it existed anywhere at all, it was only in the consensus of human opinion. I think I went this route because being sloppy here helped me “fit in” better with society. It’s much easier to be egalitarian and respect everyone when you can always say “Well, I suppose that might be right -- you never know!”

2. Beliefs are for controlling anticipation (Not for being interesting) - I think in the past, I looked to believe surprising, interesting things whenever I could get away with the results not mattering too much. Also, in a desire to be exceptional, I naïvely reasoned that believing similar things to other smart people would probably get me the same boring life outcomes that many of them seemed to be getting... so I mostly tried to have extra random beliefs in order to give myself a better shot at being the most amazingly successful and awesome person I could be.

Followup to:  The Design Space of Minds-in-General, Ghosts in the Machine, A Priori

What is so terrifying about the idea that not every possible mind might agree with us, even in principle?

For some folks, nothing—it doesn't bother them in the slightest. And for some of those folks, the reason it doesn't bother them is that they don't have strong intuitions about standards and truths that go beyond personal whims.  If they say the sky is blue, or that murder is wrong, that's just their personal opinion; and that someone else might have a different opinion doesn't surprise them.

For other folks, a disagreement that persists even in principle is something they can't accept.  And for some of those folks, the reason it bothers them, is that it seems to them that if you allow that some people cannot be persuaded even in principle that the sky is blue, then you're conceding that "the sky is blue" is merely an arbitrary personal opinion.

Yesterday, I proposed that you should resist the temptation to generalize over all of mind design space.  If we restrict ourselves to minds specifiable in a trillion bits or less, then each universal generalization "All minds m: X(m)" has two to the trillionth chances to be false, while each existential generalization "Exists mind m: X(m)" has two to the trillionth chances to be true.

This would seem to argue that for every argument A, howsoever convincing it may seem to us, there exists at least one possible mind that doesn't buy it.

And the surprise and/or horror of this prospect (for some) has a great deal to do, I think, with the intuition of the ghost-in-the-machine—a ghost with some irreducible core that any truly valid argument will convince.