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Another way of breaking loose of 'arguments': Any time somebody manages to persuade you of something via much hard work, do not neglect to remember that you would, if you had been smarter, probably have been persuadable by the empty string.
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The world is not made of arguments. Think not "which of whese arguments, for these two opposing sides, is more compelling? And how reliable is compellingness?" Think instead of the objects the arguments discuss, and let the arguments guide your thoughts about them.
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Or to put it another way: You shouldn't need to read _Nanosystems_ to get that molecular nanotechnology, the 'weaker' arguments in _Engines of Creation_ should suffice because they're still right - but Eric Drexler is who he is, because *he* was persuadable by the empty string.
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"Your strength as a rationalist is the extent to which it takes more Charisma to persuade you of false things, and less Charisma to persuade you of true things," says Planecrash. Rephrasing yet again:
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Your strength as a rationalist is the degree to which it takes "very strong and persuasive argumentation" to convince you of false things, and "weak, unpersuasive-sounding argumentation" to convince you of true things; ideally, in the latter case, the empty string should suffice.
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So, having thought about this for a bit: the Collatz Conjecture is clearly either true or false, yet no human or even posthuman intelligence is guaranteed to be able to learn the answer from nothing no matter how smart or rational.
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To say “if you were smart enough, you should have been persuadable from the empty string” is to imply that an algorithm exists to learn truth, and one doesn’t. Even in pure mathematics, an algorithm only exists to *check* truth.
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Only vacuous truths are tautological and deduction theorems only hold for silly conditionals. A dumb argument for a "truth" does not exist. If the argument is dumb, the "truth" presumed invariably turns up missing.
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I don't think that "a sufficiently smart entity would be persuadable by the empty string" actually works for claims about the physical world. It might take less data to reach the same conclusion, but the required amount of data is not zero no matter how smart you are.
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