Today's post, Reductive Reference was originally published on 03 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

 

Virtually every belief you have is not about elementary particle fields, which are (as far as we know) the actual reality. This doesn't mean that those beliefs aren't true. "Snow is white" does not mention quarks anywhere, and yet snow nevertheless is white. It's a computational shortcut, but it's still true.


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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be 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 Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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