Re: Why believe the truth?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 08:20:32 MDT

  • Next message: Rafal Smigrodzki: "RE: Why believe the truth?"

    Brett Paatsch wrote:
    > Dan Fabulich writes:
    >
    >>In particular, I consider it a fact of ethical logic that,
    >> for any X, we shouldn't believe the claim *:
    >>
    >> (*) Although X is false, we should believe X anyway.
    >
    > What about where X = "This drug will relieve your illness"
    >
    > When
    >
    > (1) The drug is a placebo and no real medication is available.
    >
    > (2) 40% of patients with the particular illness have improved
    > as a result of the placebo effect in the past.

    Perhaps the phrase "fact of ethical logic" was badly chosen - few indeed
    are the ethical heuristics that apply to all possible universes. Would
    Dan Fabulich concede that his heuristic holds true only of non-maxentropy
    universes, or perhaps even - to be conservative - that we know the
    heuristic to hold true only for Earth, and we would have to determine
    whether it holds true of other interstellar species by examining their
    individual cases? If we find that it holds true of all species
    encountered, we could try generalizing from there.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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