[SEQ RERUN] Dark Side Epistemology
Today’s post, Dark Side Epistemology was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
If you want to tell a truly convincing lie, to someone who knows what they’re talking about, you either have to lie about lots of specific object level facts, or about more general laws, or about the laws of thought. Lots of the memes out there about how you learn things originally came from people who were trying to convince other people to believe false statements.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Traditional Capitalist Values, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Once you tell a lie, the truth is your enemy; and every truth connected to that truth, and every ally of truth in general; all of these you must oppose, to protect the lie. Whether you’re lying to others, or to yourself.
If the deceiver and the deceived are the same person, either the deception or being deceived failed—but the original condition was that both succeeded. Thus a contradiction. Claims it is possible to lie to yourself are often (and perhaps in this case) a ‘you know what I mean’ shortcut that are fruitful to question.