What do we mean by Rationality?
- Epistemic rationality is improving the accuracy of your beliefs. So improving the correspondance in your mind between the map (mental representation) and the territory (reality). “Commonly called truth”
- Instrumental rationality is about choosing actions that achieve outcomes that you rank highly
- Determining truth in space and time in theory is no different than locating your bookcase in your room. Its all related to how to process the evidence and observations to update ones beliefs.
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Probability theory is the set of laws underlying rational belief.
Why truth?
- One of the reasons
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To seek truth merely for its instrumental value may seem impure—should we not desire the truth for its own sake?—but such investigations are extremely important because they create an outside criterion of verification
Whats a bias?
- “when the problem seems to come from the evolved shape of the machinery, rather from there being too little machinery, or bad specific content; then we call that a bias”
Availability
- The availability heuristic is judging the frequency or probability of an event by the ease with which examples of the event come to mind
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A society subject to regular minor hazards treats those minor hazards as an upper bound on the size of the risks, guarding against minor floods but not the occasional major one
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
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To anticipate sensory experiences as precisely as possible, we must process beliefs that are not anticipations of sensory experience
- An example here is the hands of a clock determining the rate at which an object falls. We have a set of propositional statements like the acc. of gravity and height you are at but no sense of what you should feel, or what will happen, no black box calculation that says, this will be the case
- The rationalist virtue of empiricism constantly asked which experiences our beliefs predict or prohibit
- Dont ask what to believe, ask what to anticipate
- It should provide utility in anticipations (about the world)
Applause lights
- A normal statement as not conveying any new information as the reversal is abnormal. In a sense the counter is obviously bad so saying the opposite tells us nothing.
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Lining to a normal assertion can convery information… But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light
What is Evidence
Quotes
The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area’s having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left.