(?) It sounds like 'true theory of reality' is something that could be occupied only by a final theory of physics. Decision theory just tells you the objectively best way of acting to satisfy a set of preferences.
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“Objectively best” assuming a set of axioms is satisfied. There can sometimes be a bait-and-switch or motte-and-bailey here when you try to apply this to a concrete real-world situation.
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Do you have a specific example in mind?
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Well, to get decision theory to apply, you have to characterize the situation in terms of a set of well-defined actions, well-defined outcomes, well-defined goodnesses, and you need some meaningful way of estimating probabilities. None of those are objectively given.
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This example isn't analogous but I'm curious how you'd reply to a student saying, "The notion of 'objectively true sentences' is wrong and can't be rescued, because words don't have culturally independent meanings and there's no Objective Teacher to grade answers as correct."
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This has several moving parts, so it’s a bit complicated. First, there is no clear definition of “objective” or “objectively true,” as far as I have been able to discover. There are several pretty different uses that are all quite vague.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
Under some reasonable interpretations of “objectively true,” there aren’t any outside math and possibly QFT. Under some other reasonable interpretations, lots of things are objectively true. Lots of arguments founder on this contrast.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
People who invoke “culture” here typically want to argue for some kind of extreme relativism under which they are allowed to win any argument by dismissing factual evidence and saying everything is just power politics, so they win because they are more oppressed than you.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
Words are mostly irrelevant to the issue, I think. The problems are ontological, not linguistic. It doesn’t matter what you call a categorical distinction; it matters how you draw it.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
“Man proposes, Nature disposes” is basically correct. Lots of things don’t work. In fact, since there aren’t any absolute truths (outside math and maybe QFT) nothing works perfectly consistently.
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The meta-rational question is: how can we use rational methods effectively, given that they aren’t about Objective Truths? We agree that we *do* often use them effectively, and that this is very important. I think that an accurate understanding of how that can be should help.
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