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I mean if ur theory is "well there's a mystical agent that'd purposefully messing up all our testing" I uhhh I guess this is technically possible but like, are we really gonna favor that theory over "the theory we're testing might be wrong"?

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sure but like, is the mystical agent knowable? if they're not knowable, then they're as good as not existing; if they're knowable, then there's reason to know them; maybe they spoke to you in a dream or something. And boom, now we have interaction with reality. And we can test it

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and so the poking should be done *at that*, right. like if u heard a voice in ur dream you could be like ok how often does it happen, when does it happen, does it correlate with anything, let's start keeping records

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I feel super down with poking at and testing weirdo insane things, as long as the poking and testing is happening in a way that wouldn't also validate an incorrect conclusion

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people believing dumb things can be really, really harmful, and if someone believes a very dumb thing in one area it means there's something systemically wrong with their thinking that might end up being harmful when a situation comes up that matters

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like one of my best friends dad just died too young from covid because they believed a dumb thing which was that vaccines were bad They were believing harmless dumb things in other areas all along up until that point and then someone died

5:38 PM · Apr 4, 2022

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Was trying to put my finger on the problem with the idea magic has agency, and I think it's this. lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2Lgt You can say it's not a claim, but it IS an implicit claim once you raise it. Like how religions say "something made the world, why not (my v specific thing)?"

lesswrong.com

Privileging the Hypothesis - LessWrong

Suppose that the police of Largeville, a town with a million inhabitants, are investigating a murder in which there are few or no clues—the victim was stabbed to death in an alley, and there are no f…

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yeah, the frustrating reasons are what drives me to caution against woo beliefs on twitter. This stuff is not victimless!