All of RationalObserver's Comments + Replies

Hmm, perhaps I was reading too much into it, then. I already do that part, largely because I hate memorization and can fairly easily retain facts when they are within a conceptual framework.

It's intuitive that better understanding some concept or idea leads to better updating as well as better ability to see alternative routes involving the idea, but it seemed like there was something more being implied; it seemed like there he was making a special point of some plateau or milestone for "containment" of an idea, and I didn't understand what that meant. But, as I said, I was probably reading too much into it. Thanks, this was a pleasant discussion :)

I haven't read any of that yet, but it sounds interesting. I'm commenting on articles as I read them, going through the sequences as they are listed on the sequences page.

I think it makes a practical difference in actually understanding when you understand something. The practical advice given is to "contain" the "source" for each thought. The trouble is that I don't see how to understand when such a thing occurs, so the practical advice doesn't mean much to me. I don't see how to apply the advice given, but if I could I most defini... (read more)

0TheOtherDave
I expect that in practice, the advice to "contain the source for each thought" can be generalized into the advice to understand various paths to derive that thought and understand what those paths depend on, even if we discard the idea that there's some uniquely specifiable "source". Which is why I'm not sure it makes much difference. That said, I may not be the best guy to talk about this, as I'm not especially sympathetic to this whole "Truly Part of You" line of reasoning in the first place (as I think I mentioned in a comment somewhere in this sequence of posts a few years ago, back when I was reading through the sequences and commenting on articles as I went along, so you may come across it in your readings).

The idea of a concept having or being a "source" seems odd to me. There are many ways of looking at the same concept or idea; oftentimes, the key to finding a new path is viewing an idea in a different way and seeing how it "pours", as you put it. The problem as I see it is that there are often many ways of deriving any particular idea, and no discernible reason to call any particular derivation the source. I find that my mind seems to work like a highly interconnected network, and deriving something is kind of like solving a system ... (read more)

0TheOtherDave
I'm inclined to agree. This comes up again in ways that I care more about in the Metaethics Sequence, where much is made of the distinction between normal ("instrumental") values and the so-called "terminal" values that are presumed to be their source. In both cases it seems to me that a directional tree is being superimposed on what's actually a nondirectional network, and the sense of directionality is an illusion born of limited perspective. That said, I'm not sure it makes much difference in practical terms.

I only recently got involved with LessWrong, and I'd like to explicitly point out that this is a tangent. I made this account to make an observation about the following passage:

Some clever fellow is bound to say, "Ah, but since I have hope, I'll work a little harder at my job, pump up the global economy, and thus help to prevent countries from sliding into the angry and hopeless state where nuclear war is a possibility. So the two events are related after all." At this point, we have to drag in Bayes's Theorem and measure the charge of entan

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