Great post! If this is the beginning of trend to make Less Wrong posts more accessible to a general audience, then I’m definitely a fan. There’s a lot of people I’d love to share posts with who give up when they see a wall of text.
There are two key things here I think can be improved. I think they were probably skipped over for mostly narrative purposes and can be fixed with brief mentions or slight rephrasings:
You won’t get a direct collision between belief and reality—or between someone else’s beliefs and reality—by sitting in your living-room with your eyes closed.
In addition to comparison to external data such as experimental results, there are also critical insights on reality to be gained by armchair examination. For example, armchair examination of our own or others’ beliefs may lead us to realise that they are self-contradictory, and therefore that it is impossible for them to be true. No experimental results needed! This is extraordinarily common in mathematics, and also of great personal value in everyday thinking, since many cognitive mistakes lead directly to some form of internal contradiction.
And yet it seems to me—and I hope to you as well—that the statement “The photon suddenly blinks out of existence as soon as we can’t see it, violating Conservation of Energy and behaving unlike all photons we can actually see” is false, while the statement “The photon continues to exist, heading off to nowhere” is true.
It’s better to say that the first statement is unsupported by the evidence and purely speculative. Here’s one way that it could in fact be true: if our world is a simulation which destroys data points which won’t in any way impact the future observations of intelligent beings/systems. In fact, that’s an excellent optimisation over an entire class of possible simulations of universes. There would be no way for us to know this of course (the question is inherently undecideable) but it could still happen to be true. In fact, we can construct extremely simply toy universes for which this is true. Undecideability in general is a key consideration that seems missing from many Less Wrong articles, especially considering how frequently it pops up within any complex system.
Great post! If this is the beginning of trend to make Less Wrong posts more accessible to a general audience, then I’m definitely a fan. There’s a lot of people I’d love to share posts with who give up when they see a wall of text.
There are two key things here I think can be improved. I think they were probably skipped over for mostly narrative purposes and can be fixed with brief mentions or slight rephrasings:
In addition to comparison to external data such as experimental results, there are also critical insights on reality to be gained by armchair examination. For example, armchair examination of our own or others’ beliefs may lead us to realise that they are self-contradictory, and therefore that it is impossible for them to be true. No experimental results needed! This is extraordinarily common in mathematics, and also of great personal value in everyday thinking, since many cognitive mistakes lead directly to some form of internal contradiction.
It’s better to say that the first statement is unsupported by the evidence and purely speculative. Here’s one way that it could in fact be true: if our world is a simulation which destroys data points which won’t in any way impact the future observations of intelligent beings/systems. In fact, that’s an excellent optimisation over an entire class of possible simulations of universes. There would be no way for us to know this of course (the question is inherently undecideable) but it could still happen to be true. In fact, we can construct extremely simply toy universes for which this is true. Undecideability in general is a key consideration that seems missing from many Less Wrong articles, especially considering how frequently it pops up within any complex system.