Epistemic status: searching for truthiness
Conversation
Most truthiness isn’t outrageous bullshit. It’s just regular truth with scope qualifications and caveats and doubts removed, and confidence rounded up to 100%.
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Lowers cognitive burden of maintaining possible worlds where an idea is not true.
It’s almost the definition of “believing”. Truth can only be held in a contingent, unsatisfying way. To get to fulfilling belief you have to drop doubt and possible worlds based on doubt.
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So truthiness is about turning ◇ into □ via degeneracy
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Modal degeneracy. “X is true in all possible worlds because I have managed to render myself unconscious to ones in which it might not be”
In case it isn’t obvious I approve of this procedure. So long as you extend to others the courtesy of recognizing their right to do the same.
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If you can learn to be genuinely surprised at something happening that you actually knew could happen, but managed to forget you knew, you’ve learned how to believe. Black belt: being stunned and blindsided by utterly predictable stuff playing out in utterly predictable ways.
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I recall my 9th grade biology teacher told us a joke/paradox about surprise that illustrates the process.
On Saturday, warden tells prisoner: “you will be executed between now and Friday, on a day that will surprise you.”
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Prisoner smugly infers he’s safe from execution, why?
Well, he can’t be executed on Friday because then he’d know by Thursday night and it wouldn’t be surprising. But then he can’t be executed on Thursday either, and so on recursively through to Sunday. Yay, he’s safe!
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On Tuesday, warden executes the prisoner, who is very surprised.
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Ah sounds like it’s called the unexpected hanging paradox in the literature.
I’d like a less contrived example. Like people being genuinely surprised when Trump won, even though it was a formal possibility all along. I think that maps here somehow.
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Replying to @vgr
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpecte
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Replying to
It's because there's an asymmetry in how time passes? I don't know, I never got this one.
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That’s part of it. You’re doing induction backwards in time but your knowledge is growing forward in time. What you know you will know on Thu night is illegal to use on Wed night for inference unless you know for sure *on* Wed night you’ll actually make it to Thu night.
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You could make it more Monty Hall-y like so:
There are two doors, Door 1 and Door 2.
A prize is behind one and you will be surprised when you see!
BUT, you have to open Door 1 first.


