It's in fact useful for eye-checking many sets of numbers we multiply in practice. It tells us ordering 37 of a $16 product should not cost $100,000 like the computer says, even if you can't do the arithmetic in your head.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
You need to understand the right context in which to use this tool, and its limits, and not take the recipe as an absolute, and check the results against common sense and reality.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
Imagine now that all you know are many recipes like this, and counting and object discrimination is as fuzzy as ever.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
You might be very skeptical of any claim about an Absolute Mathematical Truth that casts all the practical recipes as shadows, and it would certainly take some facility with abstraction just to understand the claim.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
After all, you've seen so many enthusiastic youngsters who believe Digit-Adding works absolutely every time and is the only tool you ever need in the toolbox.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @Meaningness and
What you're being presented with isn't a replacement for your toolbox, though. It's a more abstract knowledge that governs every tool you can try to invent, even though you still need the tools because you can't use Absolute Math to get the answer, plus counting is still fuzzy.
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(I’m not sure if this tweet is the completion of a train of thought, or if you are still going?) I don’t follow (thus far). I’ve said that math is a domain of absolute truth. It’s a thing we do have, not an ideal we approximate.
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Only if you have a computer and even then you can't calculate the 100th Busy Beaver number or the leading digit of Graham's Number. It's easy to state slightly harder math questions that leave us with only guessing heuristics and no way to just Apply The Defintion of A Number.
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Right. But isn’t your point that even if we can’t implement it, decision theory is Correct? I’m agreeing that it is Correct in the sense that it’s math and math is absolutely true (or not at all).
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I'm genuinely not sure what you mean by Correct in a sense that DT could be inCorrect. DT is valid math, and it also has another key property that might not be what you mean by Correctness; it's math that governs all the tools in a certain toolbox and helps us make better tools.
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Well, I was capitalizing it to convey that it appears to me that it has some special status for you. I don’t exactly understand what you think the specialness is.
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