rationality is a method of dealing with uncertainty by devouring information and making simplifying assumptions about the outside world until you can convince yourself that you understand it
rationality is a method of dealing with uncertainty by devouring information and making simplifying assumptions about the outside world until you can convince yourself that you understand it
Living with doubt is not a virtue—the purpose of every doubt is to annihilate itself in success or failure, and a doubt that just hangs around accomplishes nothing. But sometimes a doubt does take a while to annihilate itself. Living with a stack of currently unresolved doubts is an unavoidable fact of life for rationalists. Doubt shouldn’t be scar
... See moreEliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
A maximally efficient bug-free reasoner in the real world, in fact, would still need to rely on heuristics and approximations. The optimal computationally tractable algorithms for changing beliefs fall short of probability theory’s consistency.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
A doubt that is not investigated might as well not exist. Every doubt exists to destroy itself, one way or the other. An unresolved doubt is a null-op; it does not turn the wheel, neither forward nor back.
Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality
Taleb’s notion of rationality-as-risk-management liberates “rationality” from conflicting sets of rhetorical expectations, and replaces them with a common set of market incentives .
Market incentives create the kind of consensus the information age demands, and also the kind of people who can tolerate it .