Eliezer, it’s the combination of (1) totally untrustworthy brain machinery and (2) no immediate need to make a choice that I’m suggesting means that withholding judgement is reasonable. I completely agree that you’ve found a bug; congratulations, you may file a bug report and add it to the many other bug reports already on file; but how do you get from there to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to make a choice between these two options?
When I read the question, I didn’t go into a coma or become psychotic. I didn’t even join a crazy religion or start beating my wife. If for some reason I actually had to make such a choice, I still wouldn’t go nuts. So I think analogies with crashing software are inappropriate. (Again, I don’t deny that there’s a valid bug report. I’m just questioning its severity.)
So what we have here is an architectural problem with the software, which produces a failure mode in which input radically different from any that will ever actually be supplied provokes a small user-interface glitch. It would be nice to fix it, but it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable if it doesn’t make it through some people’s triage.
(Santa Claus versus the Easter Bunny is much nearer to being a realistic question, and so far as I can tell there isn’t anything in my mental machinery that fundamentally isn’t equipped to consider it. Kill the bunny.)
Eliezer, it’s the combination of (1) totally untrustworthy brain machinery and (2) no immediate need to make a choice that I’m suggesting means that withholding judgement is reasonable. I completely agree that you’ve found a bug; congratulations, you may file a bug report and add it to the many other bug reports already on file; but how do you get from there to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to make a choice between these two options?
When I read the question, I didn’t go into a coma or become psychotic. I didn’t even join a crazy religion or start beating my wife. If for some reason I actually had to make such a choice, I still wouldn’t go nuts. So I think analogies with crashing software are inappropriate. (Again, I don’t deny that there’s a valid bug report. I’m just questioning its severity.)
So what we have here is an architectural problem with the software, which produces a failure mode in which input radically different from any that will ever actually be supplied provokes a small user-interface glitch. It would be nice to fix it, but it doesn’t strike me as unreasonable if it doesn’t make it through some people’s triage.
(Santa Claus versus the Easter Bunny is much nearer to being a realistic question, and so far as I can tell there isn’t anything in my mental machinery that fundamentally isn’t equipped to consider it. Kill the bunny.)