Finally reading Yudkowsky, though I don't expect to get much out of it. The framing of beliefs as useless if they don't directly predict experience is bizarre to me. Beliefs are like nets: you store some, deploy some, and only some catch anything
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Destroying the nets you have in storage or the nets that haven't caught anything isn't rational to me because it's basically destroying potentially useful cognitive structures. Some beliefs are serious play: they prepare the ground for useful belief. Some are prepared reflexes.
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If I say "Blah blah is a post-utopian, who is therefore anti-colonial" or whatever the meme was, yes, that could be meaningless, but it anticipates other analogous conditions under which meaning can be recovered, so it is still a potentially useful neural structure to train.
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In a sense all progress in thought has been a feedback loop of iterative capture of material propositions by seemingly metaphysical nonsense. I refuse to write off nascent proto-belief of the type Yudkowsky decries as "irrational". We eat plants, not soil, but plants grow in soil
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