I can’t speak for Eliezer’s intentions when he wrote this story, but I can see an incredibly simple moral to take away from this. And I can’t shake the feeling that most of the commenters have completely missed the point.
For me, the striking part of this story is that the Jester is shocked and confused when they drag him away. “How?!” He says “It’s logically impossible”. The Jester seems not to understand how it is possible for the dagger to be in the second box. My explanation goes as follows, and I think I’m just paraphrasing the king here.
1- If a king has two boxes and a means to write on them, then he can write any damn thing on them that he wants to.
2- If a king also has a dagger, then he can place that dagger inside one of the two boxes, and he can place it in whichever box he decides to place it in.
That’s it. That’s the entire explanation for how the dagger could “possibly” be inside the second box. It’s a very simple argument, that a five year old could understand, and no amount of detailed consideration by a logician is going to stop this simple argument from being true.
The jester, however, thought it was impossible for the dagger to be in the second box. Not just that it wasn’t there, but that it was IMPOSSIBLE. That’s how I read the story, anyway. He used significantly more complicated logic, and he thought that he’d proven it impossible. But it only takes a moment’s reflection to see that he’s wrong.
Some of the comments above have tried to work out what was wrong with Jester’s logic, and they’ve explained the detailed and subtle flaws in his reasoning. That’s great—if you want to develop a deep understanding of logic, self-referential statements, and mathematical truth values (and lets be fair, I suppose most of us do), but in the context of the sequences on rationality, I think there’s a much better lesson to learn.
Remember: rationalists are supposed to WIN. We’re supposed to develop reasoning skills that give us a better and more useful understanding of reality. So the lesson is this: don’t be seduced by complex and detailed logic, if that logic is taking you further and further away from an accurate description of reality. If something is already true, or already false, then no amount of reasoning will change it.
Reality is NOT required to conform to your understanding or your reasoning. It is your reasoning that should be required to conform to reality.
Breaking #24 of the Evil Overlord List makes me wince, too, even if it’s a jester doing it. Not sure if that’s the main point, though, but then, none of the proposed explanation for how the king could pull his “riddle” off without at any point lying feel entirely right to me, so, unless someone offers to help me, I shall have to take your advice and not let myself get entangled in the “complex and detailed logic”, when the answer might as well be “BS”.
There’s a lot of value in that. Sometimes it’s best not to go down the rabbit hole.
Whatever the technicalities might be, the jester definitely followed the normal, reasonable rules of this kind of puzzle, and by those rules he got the right answer. The king set it up that way, and set the jester up to fail.
If he’d done it to teach the jester a valuable lesson about the difference between abstract logic and real life, then it might have been justified. But he’s going to have the jester executed, so that argument disappears.
I think we can all agree, The King is definitely a dick.
I’ll somewhat echo what CynicalOptimist wrote. I think the message is is one any first semester logic student should have been taught or know: a valid argument is not necessarily true. The validity of an argument’s conclusion is all about form of the argument. The truth of the conclusion is an external fact existing completely independent from the argument’s structure.
I’m trying to stay levelheaded about King Richard. What I meant was that there seems to be extraneous details here—about the order things were done in, first inscribe (“key is here”, on an empty(?) box), then put dagger in, or that it was written, not spoken. Many comments only enforce the importance of that.
The “real” answer seems to be one that effectively makes all kinds of communication useless, and what I’ve spent so much time on was trying to pin down the borders of this insanity, some marker saying “abstract logic application to real life* not allowed past this point”.
*) the use of physical boxes binding the riddle to “real life”
I can’t speak for Eliezer’s intentions when he wrote this story, but I can see an incredibly simple moral to take away from this. And I can’t shake the feeling that most of the commenters have completely missed the point.
For me, the striking part of this story is that the Jester is shocked and confused when they drag him away. “How?!” He says “It’s logically impossible”. The Jester seems not to understand how it is possible for the dagger to be in the second box. My explanation goes as follows, and I think I’m just paraphrasing the king here.
1- If a king has two boxes and a means to write on them, then he can write any damn thing on them that he wants to. 2- If a king also has a dagger, then he can place that dagger inside one of the two boxes, and he can place it in whichever box he decides to place it in.
That’s it. That’s the entire explanation for how the dagger could “possibly” be inside the second box. It’s a very simple argument, that a five year old could understand, and no amount of detailed consideration by a logician is going to stop this simple argument from being true.
The jester, however, thought it was impossible for the dagger to be in the second box. Not just that it wasn’t there, but that it was IMPOSSIBLE. That’s how I read the story, anyway. He used significantly more complicated logic, and he thought that he’d proven it impossible. But it only takes a moment’s reflection to see that he’s wrong.
Some of the comments above have tried to work out what was wrong with Jester’s logic, and they’ve explained the detailed and subtle flaws in his reasoning. That’s great—if you want to develop a deep understanding of logic, self-referential statements, and mathematical truth values (and lets be fair, I suppose most of us do), but in the context of the sequences on rationality, I think there’s a much better lesson to learn.
Remember: rationalists are supposed to WIN. We’re supposed to develop reasoning skills that give us a better and more useful understanding of reality. So the lesson is this: don’t be seduced by complex and detailed logic, if that logic is taking you further and further away from an accurate description of reality. If something is already true, or already false, then no amount of reasoning will change it.
Reality is NOT required to conform to your understanding or your reasoning. It is your reasoning that should be required to conform to reality.
Breaking #24 of the Evil Overlord List makes me wince, too, even if it’s a jester doing it. Not sure if that’s the main point, though, but then, none of the proposed explanation for how the king could pull his “riddle” off without at any point lying feel entirely right to me, so, unless someone offers to help me, I shall have to take your advice and not let myself get entangled in the “complex and detailed logic”, when the answer might as well be “BS”.
There’s a lot of value in that. Sometimes it’s best not to go down the rabbit hole.
Whatever the technicalities might be, the jester definitely followed the normal, reasonable rules of this kind of puzzle, and by those rules he got the right answer. The king set it up that way, and set the jester up to fail.
If he’d done it to teach the jester a valuable lesson about the difference between abstract logic and real life, then it might have been justified. But he’s going to have the jester executed, so that argument disappears.
I think we can all agree, The King is definitely a dick.
I’ll somewhat echo what CynicalOptimist wrote. I think the message is is one any first semester logic student should have been taught or know: a valid argument is not necessarily true. The validity of an argument’s conclusion is all about form of the argument. The truth of the conclusion is an external fact existing completely independent from the argument’s structure.
I’m trying to stay levelheaded about King Richard. What I meant was that there seems to be extraneous details here—about the order things were done in, first inscribe (“key is here”, on an empty(?) box), then put dagger in, or that it was written, not spoken. Many comments only enforce the importance of that.
The “real” answer seems to be one that effectively makes all kinds of communication useless, and what I’ve spent so much time on was trying to pin down the borders of this insanity, some marker saying “abstract logic application to real life* not allowed past this point”.
*) the use of physical boxes binding the riddle to “real life”