[SEQ RERUN] Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)

Today’s post, Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences), was originally published on 28 July 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Not every belief that we have is directly about sensory experience, but beliefs should pay rent in anticipations of experience. For example, if I believe that “Gravity is 9.8 m/​s^2” then I should be able to predict where I’ll see the second hand on my watch at the time I hear the crash of a bowling ball dropped off a building. On the other hand, if your postmodern English professor says that the famous writer Wulky is a “post-utopian”, this may not actually mean anything. The moral is to ask “What experiences do I anticipate?” not “What statements do I believe?”

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we’re going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Two More Things to Unlearn from School, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.