Key phrase. The accurate map leads to more winning. Acknowledging that X obviously doesn’t work, but pretending that it does in order to win is very different from thinking X works.
ETA: It is all fine and dandy that I am getting upvotes for this, and by all means don’t stop, but really I am just a novice applying Rationality 101 whereever I see fit in order to earn my black belt.
What evidence is there that the map is static? We make maps and the world transforms. Rivers become canyons; mountains become mole hills (pardon the rhetorical ring I could not resist). Given that all maps are approximations isn’t it rational to moderate one’s navigation with the occasional off course exploration to verify that not drastic changes have occurred in the geography?
And because I feel the analogy is pretty far removed at this point, what I mean by that, is that if we have charted a goal-orientation based on our map that puts us on a specific trajectory, would it not be beneficial to occasional abandon our goal-orientation to explore other trajectories for potentially new and more lucrative paths.
The evidence that the territory is static is called Physics. The laws does not change, and the elegant counterargument against anti-inductionism is that if induction didn’t work our brains would stop working, because our brains depend on static laws.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the map is static. It should never be, you should always be prepared to update, there isn’t a universal prior that lets you reason inductively about any universe.
The laws don’t change by definition. If something changes, we try to figure out some invariant description of how it changes, and call that a law. We presume a law even when we don’t know the invariant description (as is the case with QM&gravity combined). If there was magic in the real world, we’d do the same thing and have same invariant laws of magic, even though number of symmetries may have been lower.
The territory is governed by unchanging perfectly global basic mathematically simple universal laws.
The Schrödinger equation does not change. Ever.
And further more, you can plot the time dimension as a spatial dimension and then navigate a model of an unchanging structure of world lines. That is an accepted model called the Block Universe in General Relativity.
The Block universe is ‘static’ that is, without time.
There is reason to believe the same can be done in quantum mechanics.
would it not be beneficial to occasional abandon our goal-orientation to explore other trajectories for potentially new and more lucrative paths.
Why would that not be part of the trajectory traced out by your goal-orientation, or a natural interaction between the fuzziness of your map and your goals?
Well you would try to have that as part of your trajectory, but what I am suggesting is that there will always be things beyond your planning, beyond your reasoning, so in light of this perhaps we should strategically deviate from those plans every now and then to double check what else is out there.
I’m still confused by what you’re considering inside my reasoning and outside my planning / reasoning. If I say “spend 90% of your time in the area with the highest known EV and 10% of your time measuring areas which have at least a 1% chance of having higher reward than the current highest EV, if they exist,” then isn’t my ignorance about the world part of my plan / reasoning, such that I don’t need to deviate from those plans to double check?
It is all fine and dandy that I am getting upvotes for this, and by all means don’t stop, but really I am just a novice applying Rationality 101 whereever I see fit in order to earn my black belt.
Personally, I think that behavior should be rewarded.
Personally, I think that behavior should be rewarded.
Thank you, and I share that view. Why don’t we see everyone doing it? Why, I would be overjoyed if everyone was so firmly trained in Rat101 that comments like these were not special.
But now I am deviating into a should-world + diff.
Though among LW members, people probably don’t need to be encouraged to use basic rationality. If we could just upvote and downvote people’s arguments in real life...
I’m also considering the possibility that MHD was asking why we don’t see everyone using Rationality 101.
Key phrase. The accurate map leads to more winning. Acknowledging that X obviously doesn’t work, but pretending that it does in order to win is very different from thinking X works.
ETA: It is all fine and dandy that I am getting upvotes for this, and by all means don’t stop, but really I am just a novice applying Rationality 101 whereever I see fit in order to earn my black belt.
What evidence is there that the map is static? We make maps and the world transforms. Rivers become canyons; mountains become mole hills (pardon the rhetorical ring I could not resist). Given that all maps are approximations isn’t it rational to moderate one’s navigation with the occasional off course exploration to verify that not drastic changes have occurred in the geography?
And because I feel the analogy is pretty far removed at this point, what I mean by that, is that if we have charted a goal-orientation based on our map that puts us on a specific trajectory, would it not be beneficial to occasional abandon our goal-orientation to explore other trajectories for potentially new and more lucrative paths.
The evidence that the territory is static is called Physics. The laws does not change, and the elegant counterargument against anti-inductionism is that if induction didn’t work our brains would stop working, because our brains depend on static laws.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the map is static. It should never be, you should always be prepared to update, there isn’t a universal prior that lets you reason inductively about any universe.
The territory is not static. Have you ever heard of quantum physics?
Quantum physics is invariant under temporal translation too.
The laws don’t change by definition. If something changes, we try to figure out some invariant description of how it changes, and call that a law. We presume a law even when we don’t know the invariant description (as is the case with QM&gravity combined). If there was magic in the real world, we’d do the same thing and have same invariant laws of magic, even though number of symmetries may have been lower.
The territory is governed by unchanging perfectly global basic mathematically simple universal laws.
The Schrödinger equation does not change. Ever.
And further more, you can plot the time dimension as a spatial dimension and then navigate a model of an unchanging structure of world lines. That is an accepted model called the Block Universe in General Relativity. The Block universe is ‘static’ that is, without time.
There is reason to believe the same can be done in quantum mechanics.
Why would that not be part of the trajectory traced out by your goal-orientation, or a natural interaction between the fuzziness of your map and your goals?
Well you would try to have that as part of your trajectory, but what I am suggesting is that there will always be things beyond your planning, beyond your reasoning, so in light of this perhaps we should strategically deviate from those plans every now and then to double check what else is out there.
I’m still confused by what you’re considering inside my reasoning and outside my planning / reasoning. If I say “spend 90% of your time in the area with the highest known EV and 10% of your time measuring areas which have at least a 1% chance of having higher reward than the current highest EV, if they exist,” then isn’t my ignorance about the world part of my plan / reasoning, such that I don’t need to deviate from those plans to double check?
Personally, I think that behavior should be rewarded.
Thank you, and I share that view. Why don’t we see everyone doing it? Why, I would be overjoyed if everyone was so firmly trained in Rat101 that comments like these were not special.
But now I am deviating into a should-world + diff.
I’m pretty sure we do see everyone doing it. Randomly selecting a few posts, in The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes the vast majority of comments received at least one upvote, the Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit thread have slightly more than 50% upvoted comments and the Rationally Irrational comments also have more upvoted than not.
It seems to me that most reasonably-novel insights are worth at least an upvote or two at the current value.
EDIT: Just in case this comes off as disparaging LW’s upvote generosity or average comment quality, it’s not.
Though among LW members, people probably don’t need to be encouraged to use basic rationality. If we could just upvote and downvote people’s arguments in real life...
I’m also considering the possibility that MHD was asking why we don’t see everyone using Rationality 101.