I forget if we’ve talked about this specifically before, but I rarely couch things in ways that make clear I’m talking about what I think rather than what is “true” unless I am pretty uncertain and want to make that really clear or expect my audience to be hostile or primarily made up of essentialists. This is the result of having an epistemology where there is no direct access to reality so I literally cannot say anything that is not a statement about my beliefs about reality, so saying “I think” or “I believe” all the time is redundant because I don’t consider eternal notions of truth meaningful (even mathematical truth, because that truth is contingent on something like the meta-meta-physics of the world and my knowledge of it is still mediated by perception, cf. certain aspects of Tegmark).
I think of “truth” as more like “correct subjective predictions, as measured against (again, subjective) observation”, so when I make claims about reality I’m always making what I think of as claims about my perception of reality since I can say nothing else and don’t worry about appearing to make claims to eternal, essential truth since I so strongly believe such a thing doesn’t exist that I need to be actively reminded that most of humanity thinks otherwise to some extent. Sort of like going so hard in one direction that it looks like I’ve gone in the other because I’ve carved out everything that would have allowed someone to observe me having to navigate between what appear to others to be two different epistemic states where I only have one of them.
This is perhaps a failure of communication, and I think I speak in ways in person that make this much clearer and then I neglect the aspects of tone not adequately carried in text alone (though others can be the judge of that, but I basically never get into discussions about this concern in person, even if I do get into meta discussions about other aspects of epistemology). FWIW, I think Eliezer has (or at least had) a similar norm, though to be fair it got him into a lot of hot water too, so maybe I shouldn’t follow his example here!
I forget if we’ve talked about this specifically before, but I rarely couch things in ways that make clear I’m talking about what I think rather than what is “true” unless I am pretty uncertain and want to make that really clear or expect my audience to be hostile or primarily made up of essentialists. This is the result of having an epistemology where there is no direct access to reality so I literally cannot say anything that is not a statement about my beliefs about reality, so saying “I think” or “I believe” all the time is redundant because I don’t consider eternal notions of truth meaningful (even mathematical truth, because that truth is contingent on something like the meta-meta-physics of the world and my knowledge of it is still mediated by perception, cf. certain aspects of Tegmark).
I think of “truth” as more like “correct subjective predictions, as measured against (again, subjective) observation”, so when I make claims about reality I’m always making what I think of as claims about my perception of reality since I can say nothing else and don’t worry about appearing to make claims to eternal, essential truth since I so strongly believe such a thing doesn’t exist that I need to be actively reminded that most of humanity thinks otherwise to some extent. Sort of like going so hard in one direction that it looks like I’ve gone in the other because I’ve carved out everything that would have allowed someone to observe me having to navigate between what appear to others to be two different epistemic states where I only have one of them.
This is perhaps a failure of communication, and I think I speak in ways in person that make this much clearer and then I neglect the aspects of tone not adequately carried in text alone (though others can be the judge of that, but I basically never get into discussions about this concern in person, even if I do get into meta discussions about other aspects of epistemology). FWIW, I think Eliezer has (or at least had) a similar norm, though to be fair it got him into a lot of hot water too, so maybe I shouldn’t follow his example here!