I’m curious to hear how you arrived at the conclusion that a belief is a prediction.
I got this in part from Eliezer’s post Make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences. IMO, this premise (that beliefs should try to be predictions, and should try to be accurate predictions) is one of the cornerstones that LessWrong has been based on.
I just read the post that you linked to. He used the word “prediction” one time in the entire post so I’m having trouble understanding how that was mean’t to be an answer to my question. Same with that it’s a cornerstone of LessWrong, which, for me, is like asking a Christian why they believe in God, and they answer, because the Bible tells me so.
Is a belief a prediction?
If yes, and a prediction is an act of forecasting, then there must be a way to know if your prediction was correct or incorrect.
Therefore, maybe one requirement for a belief is that it’s testable, which would eliminate all of our beliefs in things unseen.
Maybe there are too many meanings assigned to just that one word—belief. Perhaps instead of it being a verb, it should be a preposition attached to a noun; i.e., a religious belief, a financial belief, etc. Then I could see a class of beliefs that were predictive versus a different class of beliefs that were matters of faith.
While he doesn’t explicitly use the word “prediction” that much in the post, he does talk about “anticipated experiences”, which around here is taken to be synonymous with “predicted experiences”.
I got this in part from Eliezer’s post Make your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences. IMO, this premise (that beliefs should try to be predictions, and should try to be accurate predictions) is one of the cornerstones that LessWrong has been based on.
I just read the post that you linked to. He used the word “prediction” one time in the entire post so I’m having trouble understanding how that was mean’t to be an answer to my question. Same with that it’s a cornerstone of LessWrong, which, for me, is like asking a Christian why they believe in God, and they answer, because the Bible tells me so.
Is a belief a prediction?
If yes, and a prediction is an act of forecasting, then there must be a way to know if your prediction was correct or incorrect.
Therefore, maybe one requirement for a belief is that it’s testable, which would eliminate all of our beliefs in things unseen.
Maybe there are too many meanings assigned to just that one word—belief. Perhaps instead of it being a verb, it should be a preposition attached to a noun; i.e., a religious belief, a financial belief, etc. Then I could see a class of beliefs that were predictive versus a different class of beliefs that were matters of faith.
While he doesn’t explicitly use the word “prediction” that much in the post, he does talk about “anticipated experiences”, which around here is taken to be synonymous with “predicted experiences”.