I think talking about it as “a price” may be tripping speculative-fiction-quest-sacrifice-buttons or something. (“Yes, we have the MacGuffin, but at what cost?!”) If all you’re saying is that truths take up brain space and brain space is both finite and valuable, I guess I can’t disagree with that, but I value my brain space mostly because it can hold truths.
Among truth-worshipers, saying anything bad about the truth is tantamout to blasphemy. Obviously that makes me one of those evil lie worshipers, who must
be sacrificed with Occam’s razor before I spread the terrible truth-slander further.
That additional beliefs take up space and time to learn is an obvious point, nobody disagrees with that. Because this point is obvious, restating it as an important truth seems silly, and suggesting that other people don’t accept it offensive. See Costs of rationality for the links to more interesting points.
Uh, the first paragraph of the post does explicity disagree, saying “one can only gain from having true information”—claiming the only exception is due to irrationality.
Note the difference between “There is one implicit assumption that makes this line of reason not true in all cases”, an actual statement from the article, and the modified version “There is only one implicit assumption that makes this line of reason not true in all cases.”
You are critiquing the modified version. It seems to me that you are searching for any unfavorable interpretation so that you can offer contrarian dissent.
Note that people have not been disagreeing with your point about the resource cost of representing true information, but also don’t think that this is a problem for the article, and object to the unclear way you have presented your point.
I think talking about it as “a price” may be tripping speculative-fiction-quest-sacrifice-buttons or something. (“Yes, we have the MacGuffin, but at what cost?!”) If all you’re saying is that truths take up brain space and brain space is both finite and valuable, I guess I can’t disagree with that, but I value my brain space mostly because it can hold truths.
Among truth-worshipers, saying anything bad about the truth is tantamout to blasphemy. Obviously that makes me one of those evil lie worshipers, who must be sacrificed with Occam’s razor before I spread the terrible truth-slander further.
That additional beliefs take up space and time to learn is an obvious point, nobody disagrees with that. Because this point is obvious, restating it as an important truth seems silly, and suggesting that other people don’t accept it offensive. See Costs of rationality for the links to more interesting points.
Uh, the first paragraph of the post does explicity disagree, saying “one can only gain from having true information”—claiming the only exception is due to irrationality.
That was part of a line of reasoning that was introduced by “I used to think that”. Pay more attention to context.
You have to read all 5 sentences in that paragraph, to read about the new position as I just described it. The original postion was much more wrong.
Note the difference between “There is one implicit assumption that makes this line of reason not true in all cases”, an actual statement from the article, and the modified version “There is only one implicit assumption that makes this line of reason not true in all cases.”
You are critiquing the modified version. It seems to me that you are searching for any unfavorable interpretation so that you can offer contrarian dissent.
Note that people have not been disagreeing with your point about the resource cost of representing true information, but also don’t think that this is a problem for the article, and object to the unclear way you have presented your point.