MapAndTerritory

Map and Territory (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

  • Very good
  • Series of lesswrong blog posts written up.
  • Rationality is about fixing the systematic errors human brains tend to make, or finding workarounds. Rationality
  • Our ability to control our muscles is evolutionary ancient, our ability to reason about our own reasoning processes is much more recent innovation. Rationality
  • The inner-eye isn't sightless, though it sees blurrily with systematic distortion. Rationality
  • That which can be destroyed by the truth should be, that which the truth nourishes should thrive. Rationality
  • Science: reflective reasoning about a more reliable process for making the content of your mind mirror the content of the world. Science
  • Science: an understandable process that correlates human brains with reality. Science Rationality WhoWeAre Science
  • Human Brain: flawed lens that can understand its own flaws and apply high-order corrections. This (when practiced) make the lens far more powerful. Rationality WhoWeAre
  • To anticipate sensory experiences as precisely as possible we must possess beliefs that are not anticipations of sensory experience. Science AI
  • Modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other areas having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is whats left. Or rather, people think that ethics is left.
  • If you say the earth is flat, people will look at you like your crazy. yet if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you! Religion
  • "Of course it matters who started the fight !"
  • "Applause light" Saying something that is so trite that the reversal sounds abnormal, then the unreversed statement is not conveying new information. Mental Models
  • A belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise.
  • The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it cant.

  • Mystery is a property of the questions, not the answers. (Ignorance exists in the map, not the territory) Paradox

    What We Don't Know

  • Better to say "Magic" than complexity or emergence, the latter create an illusion of understand. Wiser to say magic and create placeholder Mental Models
  • If you are equally good at explaining all outcomes, you have 0 knowledge Rationality
  • Counter-intuitive: Given incomplete information, the optimal strategy of guessing the color of cards does not resemble a typical sequence. Paradox "A random key does not open a random lock, just because they are both random" Paradox
  • Do not attempt to link chains of reasoning or complicated plans - just simply too difficult. Mental Models
  • You need one whole hell of a lot of rationality before it does anything but lead you into new and interesting mistakes. Rationality
  • One is taught that the password to the light bulb is "electricity!"

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