is evidence. Not irrefutable evidence
Yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind.
The idea of the story is that there are no evidence.
What I meant was that there are no possibility of new evidence.
I also think that Eve is rational. But I’m not sure if I am correct. Thank you for the confirmation.
not unfalsifiable, it’s simply unfalsfied
I am trying to make a situation where a belief is (1) unfalsified, (2) unfalsifiable, and (3) has a lack of evidence. How should I change the story such that all 3 conditions are fulfilled. And in that case, would then Eve be irrational?
The idea of the story is that there are no evidence. Because I think, in real life, sometimes, there are important and relevant things with no evidence. In this case, Adam’s innocence is important and relevant to Eve (for emotional and social reasons I presume), but there is no, and there will never be, evidence. Given that, saying: “If there is evidence, then the belief could be falsified.” is a kind of cheating because producing new evidence is not possible anymore.
Thank you, that was a very nice extension to the story. I should have included the scenario to make her belief relevant. I agree with you, assigning 100% probability is irrational in her case. But, if she is not rationally literate enough to express herself in fuzzy, non-binary way, I think she would maintain rationality through saying “Ceteris paribus, I prefer to be not locked in the same room with Cain because I believe he is a murder because I believe Adam was innocent” (ignoring ad hominem)
I was under the impression that the golden standard for rationality is falsifiability. However, I now understand that Eve is rational despite unfalsifiablity, because she remained Bayesian.
What if we were to take one step back and Adam didn’t die. Eve claims that her believe pays rent because it could be falsified if Adam changed in character. In this scenario, I suppose that you would agree to say that Eve is still rational.
Now, I cannot formulate my arguments properly at the moment, but I think it is weird that Adam’s death make Eve’s belief irrational, as per:
So I do not believe a spaceship blips out of existence when it crosses the cosmological horizon of our expanding universe, even though the spaceship’s existence has no further experimental consequences for me.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ss/no_logical_positivist_i/
Thank your the link. I just read the article. It is exactly what I had mind, but my mind works better with narrative.
What I am wondering is if a theist could use this as a foundation of their arguments and remain rational.
Thank you, that is very helpful. I wish it is said in the FAQ, or I could have missed it. I would have upvoted you if I could.
Hi, I have silly question. How do I vote? It seems obvious but I cannot see any upvote or downvote button anywhere in this page. I have tried:
looking at the top of the comment. Next to OP/TS is date, and then time, and then the points. At the far right is the ‘minimize’
looking at the bottom of the comment. I see Parent, Edit, Permalink, get notification
The FAQ says: >you can vote submissions and comments up or down just like you can on Reddit but I cannot find the vote button anywhere near comments or post.
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
I went to Melbourne University and did an exchange program to UCSD. So I have comparison. I think the distribution of the quality of teaching is sufficiently narrow that it should not play a major factor..
There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.
Depending on the job and your part of the world, personal connection might be a very important factor in carer success. It is more likely that you will would gain more, better personal connection in better university.
I bought a $1400 mattress in my quest for sleep, over the Internet hence much cheaper than the mattress I tried in the store, but non-returnable. When the new mattress didn’t seem to work too well once I actually tried sleeping nights on it, this was making me reluctant to spend even more money trying another mattress. I reminded myself that the $1400 was a sunk cost rather than a future consequence, and didn’t change the importance and scope of future better sleep at stake (occurring once per day and a large effect size each day).
from http://rationality.org/checklist/
Is it rational for someone to choose to NOT buy another mattress, not because of the sunk cost, but in order to “punish” oneself (stick and carrot style) to change their behavior and not buy non-returnable, expensive things, ever again? (or to be more careful when buying expensive things)
A dollar feels more important than it actually is, so people treat the bets seriously even though they are not very serious.
Although there is a weight in the dollar, I think there is also another reason why people take it more seriously. People adjust their believe according to what other people believe and their confidence level. Therefore, when you propose a bet, even only for a dollar, you are showing a high confidence level and this decrease their confidence level. As a result, system 2 kicks in and they will be > [forced] to evaluate honestly.
To the best of my knowledge, human brain is a simulation machine. It unconsciously making prediction about what sensory input it should expect. This include the higher level input, like language and even concepts. This is the basic mechanism underlying surprise and similar emotion. Moreover, it only makes simulation on the things it cares about and filter the rest.
Given this, I would think that most of your prediction is obsolete, because we are doing this unconsciously. Example:
You predict you will finish the task one week early. But you are ended up finishing one day early. You are not surprised. But if you ended up finishing one day late, then you would be surprised. When people are surprised by the same trigger often enough, most normal people I presume, will update their believe. I know this is related to planning fallacy, but I think my arguments still hold water.
You post a post on Facebook. You didn’t make any conscious prediction on the reaction of the audience. You got one million likes. I bet you will be surprised and scratching your mind about why and how you could get such reaction.
Otherwise, I still see some value in what you are doing, but not because of prediction per se, but because you it effectively mitigate bias. For example. “Predict how well you understand someone’s position by trying to paraphrase it back to him.” It addresses illusion of transparency. But I think there is not much more value in making prediction rather than simply making a habit to paraphrase more often than otherwise without making prediction.
Making conscious prediction, on top of the unconscious one, is cognitively costly. I do think it might improve one’s calibration and accuracy and is superior to the improvement made by the surprise mechanism alone. However, the question is, is the calibration and accuracy improvement worth the extra cognitive cost?
I’m not sure how do you define concept. According to what I understood, I think you might be missing these:
Feed back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback the impact of something halts its cause.
feed forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_forward_(control) the impact of something reinforce its cause
self fulfilling prophecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy a prophecy is being fulfilled because the prophecy was made, usually because active agents tried to prevent the prediction from happening
emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence a collection of simpler elements and behavior generating a more complex pattern when multiple elements are connected to each other.
We’d love to know who you are, what you’re doing: I was a high school teacher. Now I’m back to school for Honours and hopefully PhD in science (computational modelling) in Australia. I’m Chinese-Indonesian (my grammar and spelling are a mess) and I’m a theist (leaning toward Reformed Christianity).
what you value: Whatever is valuable.
how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us: My friend who is now a sister under the Fransiscan order of the Roman Catholic Church recommended me Harry Potter and the method of Rationality.
I think the theist community needs a better, more rational arguments for their belief. I think the easiest way is to test it against rational people. I hope this is the right place.
I am interested in making rationality be more accessible to the general public.
I am also interested in developing an ideal, universal curriculum. And I think rationality should be an integral part of it.
Yes exactly! The issue with that is the irrelevance of it. It is of no great import to anyone (except the teapot church, which I think is a bad satire of religion. The amount of suspension of disbelieve the narrative require is beyond me). On the other hand, Adam’s innocence is relevant, meaningful and important to Eve (I hope this is obvious from the narrative).
Moreover, since people are assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, in the eye of many laws, the burden of proof argument from Russell’s teapot is not applicable here.
In this twist of Russell’s teapot, I think it is rational for Eve to maintain her belief. And that her belief is relevant and the burden of proof is not upon her. And by extension, this argument could be used by theist. But I know that my reasoning is not impeccable, so here I am Less Wrong.