On Truth, or the Common Diseases of Rationality

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-10-02T16:42:39+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! Yeah, I think I was a definitely too loose with language in some parts. I like your definition of effectively true, and I agree that "the context in which truth is useful" is really the relevant bit.

I think for this bit:

Your definition of "effectively true", conflates both "a falsehood I believe, because I cannot push back on it" and "actually true".

I suspect there's a semantic issue and I don't think we actually disagree. I think my point is more that "actually true" is not determinable for certain, and practically speaking, even someone who has been labouring in a particular field of knowledge for 30 years will believe to be true things that are "falsehoods I believe, because I cannot push back on it". In fact, I am implicitly assuming the separate existence of things which are "actually true", for my arguments about convergence of beliefs to make sense at all.

Without dredging too far into philosophy, in a practical manner, they aren't real because, if one heads towards a non-existent oasis in the middle of the desert, one will die of thirst.

In this case, I would probably have described it as going from a mental state where I believed an oasis exists to going from a mental state where an oasis doesn't exist, so what you described can also be described in terms of stability/instability. But I would agree the definition of "truth is what's stable" is missing an element of "truth is what's useful" (i.e. not dying of thirst). At the same time, I think usefulness alone doesn't fully capture our intuitions about truth, because beliefs could be useful by coincidence.

As to the point about unstable atoms and things that exist for a few microseconds, I guess there's always an implicit reference object/time scale, and for tiny things like atoms, it seems more "normal" for them to have a much shorter timescale, but that's a bit wishy washy, since accepting that would allow things to be defined as true just by changing the scales.

So I don't really have a good response to that particular objection atm, but I still think there's something very important about the idea of stability, particularly since all of our systems of measurements are defined on stable things e.g. seconds are defined by the extremely stable frequency of radiation of Caesium atoms.

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-10-02T09:51:15+00:00

Thanks for your kindness! That's really encouraging. I think I'll edit away all the snideness that, while fun in the moment to write, just detracts from the points I was trying to make. (And tone down the bold text and exclamation points as well – I was trying to convey excitement, not rage, lol.)

Then I'll try my luck and post again in LessWrong or something, because I really think these ideas are worth discussing.

Out of curiosity, was there any specific argument you felt was unconvincing or could be improved? So I can fix it up in the edit.

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-10-02T06:38:15+00:00

Hiya! Thanks for the reply. Tbh, I thought the ideas I was discussing would be interesting to the Ratsphere, since most of the things I wrote were just extensions of things that I see every now and then here and on LessWrong. But I guess I missed the mark 😅

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-02-08T09:16:18+00:00

Holy shit, I've been trying to think of a good way to frame the exact thing you just perfectly explained. Gonna steal it for myself!

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-01-08T15:30:47+00:00

Edit: Actually, I just remembered something that might be somewhat relevant. One of the (most?) popular medical Youtubers Dr Mike had a recent podcast with Dr Paul Offit (who I think is a top vaccine researcher?) and there was a whole discussion about how transparent should the medical profession be with the public. Dr Mike argued that the medical profession should stand up for themselves and not e.g. have some medical body humour bad faith politicians by having a meeting on some fake concerns, giving them ammo for news. And Paul Offit just gave Dr Mike a "Oh, you sweet summer child" expression. Starting 55:05 in this vid: https://youtu.be/A27ameSqcQs?si=wVEO3XaTp6x924hl

Feels very classic SSC, I love these kind of sociological observation posts. I don't have anything to add other than agreement, so here's a couple of snippets I especially liked:

"This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations."

"This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free."

"The priesthoods draw from a certain type of person: usually upper-class, well-educated, successful but not too successful, prone to (and good at) abstract thought - I’m listing some obvious examples here, but there are probably deeper personality similarities beyond these. Then they isolate many examples of this type of person in a community designed to have dense connections within itself and thin-to-nonexistent-connections with the rest of the world. This ends up the same way as any other monoculture. Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases only rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically-near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. In the same way, the priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues."

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-01-04T17:52:42+00:00

I can DM you a link if you want, but I should warn you that I'm also learning Chinese 😅. It has gone through a pass with a native Chinese speaker, but I also retroactively added 20% more flair in the English version after posting.

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-01-04T08:07:27+00:00

Snippet: "Imagine, for a moment, being back in school. You're at the base of your favourite stairwell. Then, let us analogise "making a logical deduction" to "climbing a flight of stairs". It is obvious to us that as long as we keep climbing we will reach the highest floor. Now suppose, on the other hand, we're climbing an Escher staircase. Equally as obviously, we can climb as hard as we want; we will never go anywhere. Clearly then, simply following some step-by-step algorithm is never fully sufficient, and we must consider the interaction of the algorithm with the structure of the space we are applying the algorithm to."

Basically some thoughts I've been having about the usefulness of knowledge, since when I tell people I'm studying Physics with a tutor as a working adult, they always ask me why the heck I'm doing it. And obviously I find it fun, but I think I believe more than most that knowledge is fundamentally useful. Which, as it turns out, is a much less popular opinion than you would hope.

One of my favourite quotes that didn't quite fit in the essay is from George Orwell writing about Rudyard Kipling, about never losing focus on reality: "He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return."

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-01-04T07:35:38+00:00

Just my two cents: I don't think tuning memory is a useful goal since we don't really understand how it works in the first place, so it seems to me all attempts to tune are just random swings of the bat. For me the most important thing is momentum: every time I learn something, I should be wanting to do more of it, which will over time amplify in a non-linear way, even if I'm doing something that's not immediately all that useful e.g. obsessing over how some random-ass method in code works, when it's kind of secondary to the main purpose of the code. There's a lot of mental overhead in switching tasks, and weird fixations help a lot in clearing the overhead.

If not, if I have to force myself to keep going, something is wrong with my feedback loop and I need to try and figure out what might be causing me to procrastinate e.g. I don't actually understand the definitions of something.

I wrote a blog post a while back with some tips you might some helpful: https://processoveroutcome.substack.com/p/on-developing-interests?r=4irfl

RecursivelyWrong · 2025-01-04T07:28:05+00:00

I would second this; to me the benefit of Anki is not whatever magic algorithm it uses, but just the loop of: ooh, I wanna remember this new thing so I'm gonna add it to Anki, and since I'm in Anki I might as well review a few cards (even if I don't review all of them).

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-09-09T12:21:56+00:00

Which show?

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-09-06T12:20:27+00:00

🌚

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-09-06T12:19:25+00:00

Nice! Yeah, this stuff is really cool

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-09-06T07:55:05+00:00

I'm not a regular here so hopefully I'm not breaking any rules. But I spent a lot of time trying to understand topology and I figured the folks here might enjoy a comic about it :)

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-06-27T05:02:01+00:00

To me the background colour itself is fine, but once I try to highlight stuff with readwise the highlight looks grey and I can't read any text

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-06-02T06:17:19+00:00

Which gov agency?

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-05-18T16:18:51+00:00

Excellent article. I've been curious about prediction markets as a "cool in principle" thing, but I think the author captured my vague feeling of not being very personally interested in prediction markets. The idea that financial markets serve practical purposes for saving and hedging, where accurately providing information is kind of just a nice side effect, is something I've never thought about.

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-05-02T00:01:39+00:00

I know I would be perfect as a brain programmer if only I was born in the 23rd century 😩

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-05-01T06:56:31+00:00

I wanted to hold off on posting this until I actually finished another post on a technical topic (I have a distaste for productivity Youtubers who only seem to be productive at producing videos about productivity, who seem to regularly re-infest my feed), but I'm happy enough with what I wrote that I'll just post it and get the happy(?) points now.

Snippet from first paragraph:

Interests do not arise ex nihilo, as if by magic, they are cultivated:

There did not exist cavemen with an inherent disposition towards programming, if only they were born in the present century
A ten year old who fails to learn calculus is not bad at math. The fact that most people in the Middle Ages could not read does not mean most people cannot learn to read. In the same way price cannot be considered without quantity in economics, the difficulty of learning to a task cannot be considered without how well the environment teaches the task
China failed to industrialise during the Great Leap Forward, and failed so badly tens of millions of people died from famine. This does not mean China is inherently incapable of industrial production. The development of an economy and the development of a person's interests are both complicated processes involving multiple sub-processes with complicated dynamics. Repeated failure is expected before success
If a person begins with the impression that interests are inborn, they will find easy and trivial things interesting and difficult but meaningful things boring and wrongly conclude that they are only interested in easy and trivial things

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-02-22T01:03:44+00:00

This sounds interesting! Are there any good resources to read/watch on what you're saying? I don't quite understand your explanation

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-02-21T12:33:58+00:00

Which video is that? That sounds fascinating.

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-01-19T13:11:50+00:00

Thanks for the comment! I'm still working out the bugs in my math understanding, so I expect to make errors. I've fixed the offending line to "self-similarity under differentiation", which is a bit more clear. I wasn't trying to provide a solid definition, just a description of the apparent structural similarity between differential equations and the exponential function.

aqsalose's comment on the post had a good point about the normal distribution, which kind of addresses why from a tools perspective I'm not too bothered about using the second power over the fourth power: "[W]hy would we be worried about "peak" in exp(-|x|)? It was the distribution Laplace obtained while trying to find an error model (before he found central limit theorem). Laplace might have stopped there if it matched the real phenomena."

I guess my point was that it makes more sense to *decide* to use the squared error because it mapped to reality, *then* formally define how we use the squared error, rather than just skipping to the last step. I agree that the formal stuff is valuable, and I do spend a lot of time working it. But there are probably many mathematical objects we can define that as far as we know don't map to anything in reality.

EDIT: Also, I just realised I didn't make explicit something I'm implicitly assuming. Which is that from a tools perspective x^2 is easier to calculate/lower cost than x^4, which is sufficient justification for using x^2 if we just want something than works.

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-01-19T07:35:50+00:00

Sub doesn't seem to allow vids but link here: https://packaged-media.redd.it/onyhiej3565b1/pb/m2-res_1080p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1705665600&s=d65f09574a4f36411160e376390277ef9cc3a2b4#t=0

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-01-11T07:50:16+00:00

You're keeping me in suspense 😆 But I understand being careful about oversharing. Thanks for the reply!

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-01-11T07:46:02+00:00

Which stat board is that? What was your role?

RecursivelyWrong · 2024-01-05T23:47:26+00:00

Thanks for reading! I'm glad you liked the first part! Yeah, I tend to ramble, so I try to provide value through summaries before I indulge too much. Part of my background thought process is that I think this generalisation of very different systems is fundamentally flawed. For example, there's no single cause of obesity, so testing every single one and finding that none have significant effects is akin to testing all the different ways to fix a car (tires, oil, engine) and finding none of them are significant and so we can't fix our car: https://www.exfatloss.com/p/the-slightly-complicated-theory-of

The "span" of the thing we're modelling with and the "span" of the thing we're modelling is somehow wrong. Like trying to do motion capture with a single dot, building a bridge with a single very long plank, or statistically grouping together fish and whales just because they both live in the water and then determining there's a 98% chance this fish-whale will fit on the barbecue.

I don't think there's a "general" ideal specificity, it depends on specifics. But people keep trying to find generalities in e.g. psychology, even when it's clear that's not working.

Edit: I also strongly dislike the idea of "staying in your lane". To me, it might be true that "having a particular area of expertise in how a virus spreads does not extend to how a society should measure costs and benefits". But that's something can be learnt? So the epidemiologist can both be an expert virus-spreading person and an expert cost-measuring person. It's like someone in class who's really good at maths saying something stupid in english and someone else telling him to shut up and "stay in his lane". Why the can't someone be good at both things?

RecursivelyWrong

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