Taking Ideas Seriously
I, the author, no longer endorse this post. Abstrummary: I describe a central technique of epistemic rationality that bears directly on instrumental rationality, and that I do not believe has been explicitly discussed on Less Wrong before. The technnique is rather simple: it is the practice of taking ideas seriously. I also present the rather simple metaphor of an 'interconnected web of belief nodes' (like a Bayesian network) to describe what it means to take an idea seriously: it is to update a belief and then accurately and completely propagate that belief update through the entire web of beliefs in which it is embedded. I then give a few examples of ideas to take seriously, followed by reasons to take ideas seriously and what bad things happens if you don't (or society doesn't). I end with a few questions for Less Wrong. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Vassar are two rationalists who have something of an aura of formadability about them. This is especially true of Michael Vassar in live conversation, where he's allowed to jump around from concept to concept without being penalized for not having a strong thesis. Eliezer did something similar in his writing by creating a foundation of reason upon which he could build new concepts without having to start explaining everything anew every time. Michael and Eliezer know a lot of stuff, and are able to make connections between the things that they know; seeing which nodes of knowledge are relevant to their beliefs or decision, or if that fails, knowing which algorithm they should use to figure out which nodes of knowledge are likely to be relevant. They have all the standard Less Wrong rationality tools too, of course, and a fair amount of heuristics and dispositions that haven't been covered on Less Wrong. But I believe it is this aspect of their rationality, the coherent and cohesive and carefully balanced web of knowledge and belief nodes, that causes people to p
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