I think the following should be added to the about page in some form:
Traditional Rationalists can agree to disagree. Traditional Rationality doesn’t have the ideal that thinking is an exact art in which there is only one correct probability estimate given the evidence. In Traditional Rationality, you’re allowed to guess, and then test your guess. But experience has taught me that if you don’t know, and you guess, you’ll end up being wrong.
Until I read this exact paragraph I was always a little confused as to how any of this was terribly new or eye-opening. Putting everything that I have read in the last week into a perspective that includes this paragraph makes everything significantly more potent. If this nugget was in the previous posts I either missed it or forgot it. Either way, its impact did not match its importance.
One correct probability estimate of what? You are tacitly assuming that someone has mapped the ideaspace and presented you with a tidy menu of options. But no-one could have converged on relativity before Einstein because he hadn’t thought of it yet. Guessing bad, hypothesing good.
I think the following should be added to the about page in some form:
Until I read this exact paragraph I was always a little confused as to how any of this was terribly new or eye-opening. Putting everything that I have read in the last week into a perspective that includes this paragraph makes everything significantly more potent. If this nugget was in the previous posts I either missed it or forgot it. Either way, its impact did not match its importance.
So, yeah.
One correct probability estimate of what? You are tacitly assuming that someone has mapped the ideaspace and presented you with a tidy menu of options. But no-one could have converged on relativity before Einstein because he hadn’t thought of it yet. Guessing bad, hypothesing good.
So...no.