LESSWRONG
LW

Trust

Nov 23, 2021 by Raemon

The first book is about trust, the belief in something in the absence of understanding.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660, with the motto Nullius in Verba, "On No One's Word". The promise of science was that it would be a method for discovering truth without needing to trust anyone: because experiments can and would be replicated, incorrect theories and incorrect information would be !ltered out. By exploring systems that could be understood in full, scientists eventually made breakthroughs in our understanding of every part of the natural world.

You might hope that this sort of understanding can be expanded further — that you could come to understand every part of the world, look inside to see how it works, and personally arrive at true beliefs about it. This hope would be wrong. To understand everything in the world would take an amount of time many orders of magnitude more than historical human lifespans.

In place of being able to understand any system, we have its lowly sibling, trust. Can I believe what this paper is telling me, when I don't have time to replicate its results or even read every page? Can I trust my emotions when I don’t know where they come from? Some code on StackExchange I haven’t read?

A trained machine learning system off-distribution? These are questions where we can't feasibly get a repeatable, replicable setup. The essays in this book explore the judgments we make about how to decide which sources to trust, when building our models of the world and acting upon it.

237Rule Thinkers In, Not Out
Scott Alexander
6y
67
120Gears vs Behavior
johnswentworth
6y
14
164Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
Scott Alexander
6y
20
164Reason isn't magic
Benquo
6y
19
270"Other people are wrong" vs "I am right"
Buck
6y
21
77In My Culture
Duncan Sabien (Inactive)
6y
59
208Chris Olah’s views on AGI safety
Ω
evhub
6y
Ω
40
151Understanding “Deep Double Descent”
Ω
evhub
6y
Ω
51
379How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions)
Hazard
6y
79
167Paper-Reading for Gears
johnswentworth
6y
6
335Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain
Kaj_Sotala
6y
48
219Noticing Frame Differences
Raemon
6y
40
134Propagating Facts into Aesthetics
Raemon
6y
38
77Do you fear the rock or the hard place?
Ruby
6y
10
160Mental Mountains
Scott Alexander
6y
14
206Steelmanning Divination
Vaniver
6y
49