Especially with the rise of language models where there are certain kinds of knowledge that they are excellent at, but lots of knowledge they are terrible at, I’ve focused in on the pieces they don’t understand and come to feel that there is lots of stuff I don’t understand or know very well.
Oh, and just to undermine everything I said so far, here is a completely personal view that I reasoned myself into some years ago, that clashes severely with this site’s consensus. The consensus is that there is an external reality that we, as embedded agents, build maps of, the map/territory dichotomy. I believe it is one of those blind spots, and a more accurate model is that it is maps all the way down. (And that the terms like “exist”, “reality”, “truth” and “fact” have a limited domain of applicability that is constantly and subconsciously exceeded by nearly everyone.)
I’m not sure what the value in going mysticist about it is. To me, it seems like the appropriate solution is mainly to fill the map up with scribblings like “there’s probably tons of interesting things going on here that I have no idea about”, and to mark big parts of the map with warnings like “I only believe this because John Doe said so, TODO figure out if John Doe is trustworthy and consider taking a direct peak yourself”.
Strongly agree with it being a very concerning illusion. I wrote about related things under Random facts can come back to bite you and Apparently winning by the bias of your opponents. Other writings I consider relevant include Wittgenstein’s revenge and Ignorance, a skilled practice.
Especially with the rise of language models where there are certain kinds of knowledge that they are excellent at, but lots of knowledge they are terrible at, I’ve focused in on the pieces they don’t understand and come to feel that there is lots of stuff I don’t understand or know very well.
I’m not sure what the value in going mysticist about it is. To me, it seems like the appropriate solution is mainly to fill the map up with scribblings like “there’s probably tons of interesting things going on here that I have no idea about”, and to mark big parts of the map with warnings like “I only believe this because John Doe said so, TODO figure out if John Doe is trustworthy and consider taking a direct peak yourself”.