Law-thinking is an approach in which action and reasoning are thought to have theoretical criteria (laws) specifying the optimal actions and belief adjustments in any given situation. These criteria may be impossible to apply to a situation directly, and one may be forced to use only rough approximations. But one can still evaluate the approximations based on how well they match the optimal criteria.

The relationship between laws and approximations resembles that of between physics and engineering. Physics specify the laws by which the world works, while engineering tries to find practical solutions as constrained by those laws.

Some concepts which have been used as theoretical criteria in law-thinking:...

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