His response was that too long of a life is a curse, because you’ll eventually learn all you can learn
But how many years would it take to get there? I think that 100 is not enough, even if I could somehow retain perfect health. And I am not even thinking about “all” I could learn, but only about math and computer science.
Imagine that we take someone who has a bunch of ridiculous beliefs and we remove them one by one. And suppose that we say that this person is becoming Less Wrong. … With this idea in mind, what would it mean to become More Right?
You can only be right about something, so the answer is acquiring correct domain knowledge. Preferably without having the ridiculous beliefs distort your process of evaluating evidence. Whether it is evidence about quantum physics, baking cookies, curing cancer, or understanding how the society works.
Becoming supremely rational per se would not give you the knowledge about things. But it would make learning faster, because you would notice confusion, recognize fake explanations, better generalize, notice the alternatives, recover from your mistakes upon getting further evidence, etc. So it would take you less time to learn things, and to discover new things. It would also allow you to notice more opportunities for improvement.
But how many years would it take to get there? I think that 100 is not enough, even if I could somehow retain perfect health. And I am not even thinking about “all” I could learn, but only about math and computer science.
You can only be right about something, so the answer is acquiring correct domain knowledge. Preferably without having the ridiculous beliefs distort your process of evaluating evidence. Whether it is evidence about quantum physics, baking cookies, curing cancer, or understanding how the society works.
Becoming supremely rational per se would not give you the knowledge about things. But it would make learning faster, because you would notice confusion, recognize fake explanations, better generalize, notice the alternatives, recover from your mistakes upon getting further evidence, etc. So it would take you less time to learn things, and to discover new things. It would also allow you to notice more opportunities for improvement.