I haven’t thought really deeply about that, but it seems to me that if Egan’s Law doesn’t offer you some measure of protection and also a way to cope with failures of your map, you’re probably doing it wrong.
A witty quote from an great book by a brilliant author is awesome, but does not have the status of any sort of law.
What do we mean by “normality”? What you observe around you every day? If you are wrong about the unobserved causal mechanisms underlying your observations, you will make wrong decisions. If you walk on hot coals because you believe God will not let you burn, the normality that quantum mechanics adds up to diverges enough from your normality that there will be tangible consequences. Are goals part of normality? If not, they certainly depend on assumptions you make about your model of normality. Either way, when you discover that God can’t/won’t make you fireproof, some subset of your goals will (and should) come tumbling down. This too has tangible consequences.
Some subset of the remaining goals relies on more subtle errors in your model of normality and they too will at some point crumble.
What evidence do we have that any goals at all are stable at every level? Why should the goals of a massive blob of atoms have such a universality?
I can see the point of “it all adds up to normality” if you’re encouraging someone to not be reluctant to learn new facts. But how does it help answer the question of “what goal do we pursue if we find proof that all our goals are bullshit”?
My vague notion is that if your goals don’t have ramifications in the realm of the normal, you’re doing it wrong. If they do, and some aspect of your map upon which goals depend gets altered in a way that invalidates some of your goals, you can still look at the normal-realm ramifications and try to figure out if they are still things you want, and if so, what your goals are now in the new part of your map.
Keep in mind that your “map” here is not one fixed notion about the way the world works. It’s a probability distribution over all the ways the world could work that are consistent with your knowledge and experience. In particular, if you’re not sure whether “patternists” (whatever those are) are correct or not, this is a fact about your map that you can start coping with right now.
It might be that the Dark Lords of the Matrix are just messing with you, but really, the unknown unknowns would have to be quite extreme to totally upend your goal system.
I haven’t thought really deeply about that, but it seems to me that if Egan’s Law doesn’t offer you some measure of protection and also a way to cope with failures of your map, you’re probably doing it wrong.
A witty quote from an great book by a brilliant author is awesome, but does not have the status of any sort of law.
What do we mean by “normality”? What you observe around you every day? If you are wrong about the unobserved causal mechanisms underlying your observations, you will make wrong decisions. If you walk on hot coals because you believe God will not let you burn, the normality that quantum mechanics adds up to diverges enough from your normality that there will be tangible consequences. Are goals part of normality? If not, they certainly depend on assumptions you make about your model of normality. Either way, when you discover that God can’t/won’t make you fireproof, some subset of your goals will (and should) come tumbling down. This too has tangible consequences.
Some subset of the remaining goals relies on more subtle errors in your model of normality and they too will at some point crumble.
What evidence do we have that any goals at all are stable at every level? Why should the goals of a massive blob of atoms have such a universality?
I can see the point of “it all adds up to normality” if you’re encouraging someone to not be reluctant to learn new facts. But how does it help answer the question of “what goal do we pursue if we find proof that all our goals are bullshit”?
My vague notion is that if your goals don’t have ramifications in the realm of the normal, you’re doing it wrong. If they do, and some aspect of your map upon which goals depend gets altered in a way that invalidates some of your goals, you can still look at the normal-realm ramifications and try to figure out if they are still things you want, and if so, what your goals are now in the new part of your map.
Keep in mind that your “map” here is not one fixed notion about the way the world works. It’s a probability distribution over all the ways the world could work that are consistent with your knowledge and experience. In particular, if you’re not sure whether “patternists” (whatever those are) are correct or not, this is a fact about your map that you can start coping with right now.
It might be that the Dark Lords of the Matrix are just messing with you, but really, the unknown unknowns would have to be quite extreme to totally upend your goal system.