I appreciate the effort, but I’m not sure this is a good fit for LessWrong. It seems to be using “truth” and “belief” in ways that aren’t formally defined, and doesn’t seem to be aware of Bayes’ Rule or direct math treatments of evidence and uncertainty.
I can’t tell, but it feels a bit like a prelude to some motte-and-bailey about “truth” being applied to models and generalizations, which are neither true nor false in any rigorous sense, only applicable or useful in some cases.
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at.
I know what Bayes’ Rule is, but I’m not sure how it applies to this post. I tried to mostly stick to abstract ideas of truth and perception of truth, and I didn’t really get very deep into any real examples which you might want to actually measure and statistically analyze.
I’m also not sure where you’re getting this sense of a pending Motte and Baily from. You mentioned something about models that are neither true nor false, but that didn’t give me much of a sense of what you were getting at, and if I tried to guess, I’d probably get some important aspect of it wrong. Can you describe what sort of Motte and Baily you were expecting to see? Which position was the Motte? Which position was the Baily?
I apologize for speculating about the motte-and-bailey usage of this framing. It pattern matches to other things I’ve seen where someone tries to generalize a relationship between evidence and truth in unclear ways, and then applies it to political topics where the actual propositional truth is far removed from the debate over framing and preferences. I have no reason to believe that your intent was anything but good.
My discomfort remains, in that you don’t make it clear what types of “truth” you’re talking about, nor acknowledge that different experiences do lead to different predictions of future experiences,with a lot of truths being not objective, or at least not resolvable by individual humans.
The 6 vs 9 cartoon seems like the obvious case where the participants don’t have access to the cartoonist or the person/process which created the figure on the ground. They could acknowledge that the shared truth is only that there’s a pattern visible in that shape, and that it could be interpreted as a 6 or a 9 depending on context. They CANNOT state that there is any objective truth to “what it is”. or “what it is supposed to be”.
And that generalizes—it’s not clear that there exists any “objective truth” at human perception levels. All of human experience is so far abstracted and modeled by one’s brain that the underlying quantum field interactions are averaged out and imperceptible. A lot of these sums and averages can be quite confident—the likelihood that tomorrow will contain a set of particles forming a lumpy sphere spinning in a very similar way as today’s Earth is pretty close to 1. But not exactly 1 - there’s always an epsilon. Maybe the simulation ends. Maybe we’ve missed something in our model of physics. Maybe something perfectly normal but very unlikely happens (like a collision with very large very fast object coming from outside the solar system). All vanishingly unlikely, but not actually impossible.
“Cogito ergo sum” is tautalogical, so absolutely true. But it’s not objective—it doesn’t prove anything (or anyone) else.
Regarding your suspicion of whether I would apply this to a political topic: Of course I would. There are countless political topics I would apply this to.
The ideas behind this post are a fundamental component of the way I think, how could it possibly not apply to many political opinions I hold?
Regarding your point about the 6 vs 9 cartoon, that’s essentially the main point of this article. When there is an objective truth about the physical world, that truth exists outside the mind, and it is distinct from our internal model of truth that’s inside the mind.
Our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, and even though we try to make it as accurate a simulacrum as we can, it’s still just a simulacrum.
And perhaps the most important point of my post, is that even though our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, It will seem, to us, to just be the truth itself because belief is how we experience truth.
I appreciate the effort, but I’m not sure this is a good fit for LessWrong. It seems to be using “truth” and “belief” in ways that aren’t formally defined, and doesn’t seem to be aware of Bayes’ Rule or direct math treatments of evidence and uncertainty.
I can’t tell, but it feels a bit like a prelude to some motte-and-bailey about “truth” being applied to models and generalizations, which are neither true nor false in any rigorous sense, only applicable or useful in some cases.
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at.
I know what Bayes’ Rule is, but I’m not sure how it applies to this post. I tried to mostly stick to abstract ideas of truth and perception of truth, and I didn’t really get very deep into any real examples which you might want to actually measure and statistically analyze.
I’m also not sure where you’re getting this sense of a pending Motte and Baily from. You mentioned something about models that are neither true nor false, but that didn’t give me much of a sense of what you were getting at, and if I tried to guess, I’d probably get some important aspect of it wrong. Can you describe what sort of Motte and Baily you were expecting to see? Which position was the Motte? Which position was the Baily?
I apologize for speculating about the motte-and-bailey usage of this framing. It pattern matches to other things I’ve seen where someone tries to generalize a relationship between evidence and truth in unclear ways, and then applies it to political topics where the actual propositional truth is far removed from the debate over framing and preferences. I have no reason to believe that your intent was anything but good.
My discomfort remains, in that you don’t make it clear what types of “truth” you’re talking about, nor acknowledge that different experiences do lead to different predictions of future experiences,with a lot of truths being not objective, or at least not resolvable by individual humans.
The 6 vs 9 cartoon seems like the obvious case where the participants don’t have access to the cartoonist or the person/process which created the figure on the ground. They could acknowledge that the shared truth is only that there’s a pattern visible in that shape, and that it could be interpreted as a 6 or a 9 depending on context. They CANNOT state that there is any objective truth to “what it is”. or “what it is supposed to be”.
And that generalizes—it’s not clear that there exists any “objective truth” at human perception levels. All of human experience is so far abstracted and modeled by one’s brain that the underlying quantum field interactions are averaged out and imperceptible. A lot of these sums and averages can be quite confident—the likelihood that tomorrow will contain a set of particles forming a lumpy sphere spinning in a very similar way as today’s Earth is pretty close to 1. But not exactly 1 - there’s always an epsilon. Maybe the simulation ends. Maybe we’ve missed something in our model of physics. Maybe something perfectly normal but very unlikely happens (like a collision with very large very fast object coming from outside the solar system). All vanishingly unlikely, but not actually impossible.
“Cogito ergo sum” is tautalogical, so absolutely true. But it’s not objective—it doesn’t prove anything (or anyone) else.
Regarding your suspicion of whether I would apply this to a political topic: Of course I would. There are countless political topics I would apply this to.
The ideas behind this post are a fundamental component of the way I think, how could it possibly not apply to many political opinions I hold?
Regarding your point about the 6 vs 9 cartoon, that’s essentially the main point of this article. When there is an objective truth about the physical world, that truth exists outside the mind, and it is distinct from our internal model of truth that’s inside the mind.
Our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, and even though we try to make it as accurate a simulacrum as we can, it’s still just a simulacrum.
And perhaps the most important point of my post, is that even though our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, It will seem, to us, to just be the truth itself because belief is how we experience truth.