Eliezer, I have been following your blog since a while now. I greatly appreciate your posts and am astounded at how you have the time and enthusiasm to keep writing such quality stuff so regularly.
I remember that I have gone through times where I found myself strongly convinced by person X’s arguments but finally going to “person X had been wrong in so-and-so regard etc”. For instance, you could put X as Ayn Rand.
I would have probably gone to deify you too, if not for the fact that you are trying your best to keep your readers from turning into blind followers and that you have an open comment system where interesting discussions follow your post, many of them opposing your arguments, and thus, allowing the reader to have a more rational understanding.
However, I have to constantly perform introspection to see if I have avoided the Happy Death Spiral.
Cheers, Sudeep
“Probabilities express uncertainty, and it is only agents who can be uncertain. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. Ignorance is in the mind.”
Eliezer, in quantum mechanics, one does not say that one does not have knowledge of both position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. Rather, one says that one CANNOT have such knowledge. This contradicts your statement that ignorance is in the mind. If quantum mechanics is true, then ignorance/uncertainty is a part of nature and not just something that agents have.