My heuristic in situations with recursive mutual modeling is to assume that everyone else will discard whatever line of reasoning is recursive. I then go one layer deeper into the recursion than whatever the default assumption is. It works well.
Preempt: None of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie.
“None of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie” is false because although you can’t definitively prove what my process is or isn’t you’ll still have access to information that allows you to assess and evaluate whether I was probably telling the truth.
Although “none of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie” is false and thus my first instance of “the parent of this comment is a lie” seems justified, in reality the first instance of that statement is not true. The first instance of that statement is a lie because although “none of you have any way of knowing whether or not this is true” is false, it does not follow that it was a lie. In actuality, I thought that it was true at the time that I posted it, and only realized afterwards that it was false. There was no intent to deceive.
Therefore the grandparent of this comment is true, the greatgrandparent is true, the greatgreatgrandparent is false, and the greatgreatgreat grandparent is inaccurate.
Preempt: None of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie.
The parent of this comment (yes, this one) is a lie.
The parent of this comment (yes, this one) is a lie.
The parent of this comment is true. On my honor as a rationalist.
I would like people to try to solve the puzzle.
This comment (yes, this one) is true.
I think the solution is that you have no honor as a rationalist.
The solution I had in mind is:
“None of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie” is false because although you can’t definitively prove what my process is or isn’t you’ll still have access to information that allows you to assess and evaluate whether I was probably telling the truth.
Although “none of you have any way of knowing whether this is a lie” is false and thus my first instance of “the parent of this comment is a lie” seems justified, in reality the first instance of that statement is not true. The first instance of that statement is a lie because although “none of you have any way of knowing whether or not this is true” is false, it does not follow that it was a lie. In actuality, I thought that it was true at the time that I posted it, and only realized afterwards that it was false. There was no intent to deceive.
Therefore the grandparent of this comment is true, the greatgrandparent is true, the greatgreatgrandparent is false, and the greatgreatgreat grandparent is inaccurate.
This whole line of riddling occurred because:
I wanted to confuse people, so they failed to properly evaluate the way I model people.
I wanted to distract people, so they chose not to bother properly evaluating the way I model people.
I wanted to amuse myself by pretending that I was the kind of person who cared about the above two.
I was wondering whether anyone would call me out on any of those.
I’m severely tempted to just continue making replies to myself and see how far down the rabbit hole I can get.
I laughed. The solution involves the relativity of wrong, if that helps.