Comment by Ty-Guy9 on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) · 2015-03-20T09:05:27.898Z · LW · GW

While I fully agree with the principle of the article, something stuck out to me about your comment:

In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.

What I noticed was that you were basically defining a universal prior for beliefs, as much more likely false than true. From what I've read about Bayesian analysis, a universal prior is nearly undefinable, so after thinking about it a while, I came up with this basic counterargument:

You say that true beliefs are vastly outnumbered by false beliefs, but I say, how could you know of the existence of all these false beliefs, unless each one had a converse, a true belief opposing it that you first had some evidence for? For otherwise, you wouldn't know whether it was true or false.

You may then say that most true beliefs don't just have a converse. They also have many related false beliefs opposing them. But I would say, those are merely the converses that spring from the connections of that true belief with its many related true beliefs.

By this, I hope I've offered evidence that a fifty-fifty universal T/F prior is at least as likely as one considering most unconsidered ideas to be false. (And I would describe my further thoughts if I thought they would be useful here, but, silly me, I'm replying to a post from almost 8 years ago.)

Comment by Ty-Guy9 on You Provably Can't Trust Yourself · 2015-03-20T07:33:59.729Z · LW · GW

Gödelian arguments are inescapable; you can always isolate the framework-of-trusted-arguments if a mathematical system makes sense at all. Maybe the adding-up-to-normality-ness of my system will become clearer, after it becomes clear that you can always isolate the framework-of-trusted-arguments of a human having a moral argument.

If you hadn't qualified the two statements beginning with, "you can always isolate the framework..." then it seems they would not escape Gödelian arguments. In other words, there is no reason to believe that there isn't a non-isolate-able, general moral Framework, but I suspect that you are right that it would have to be neither mathematical (small 'm') nor of-a-human. ^^

Do I represent well the principles discussed when I say this? ;)