Be Logically Informative

post by steven0461 · 2009-05-15T13:23:31.277Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 0 comments

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What's the googolplexth decimal of pi? I don't know, but I know that it's rational for me to give each possible digit P=1/10. So there's a sense in which I can rationally assign probabilities to mathematical facts or computation outcomes on which I'm uncertain. (Apparently this can be modeled with logically impossible possible worlds.)

When we debate the truth of some proposition, we may not be engaging in mathematics in the traditional sense, but we're still trying to learn more about a structure of necessary implications. If we can apply probabilities to logic, we can quantify logical information. More logical information is better. And this seems very relevant to a misunderpracticed sub-art of group rationality -- the art of responsible argumentation.

There are a lot of common-sense guidelines for good argumentative practice. In case of doubt, we can take the logical information perspective and use probability theory to ground these guidelines. So let us now unearth a few example guidelines and other obvious insights, and not let the fact that we already knew them blunt the joy of discovery.

My main recommendation: undertake a conscious effort to keep feeling your original curiosity, and let your statements flow from there, not from a habit to react passively to what bothers you most out of what has been said. Don't just speak under the constraint of having to reach a minimum usefulness threshold; try to build a sense of what, at each point in an argument, would be the most useful thing for the group to know next.

Consider a hilariously unrealistic alternate universe where everything that people argue about on the internet matters. I daresay that even there people could train themselves to mine the same amount of truth with less than half of the effort. In spite of the recent escape of the mindkill fairy, can we do especially well on LessWrong? I hope so!

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