From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 08:56:15 MDT
On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:29:01AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> >Actually, a truthful world would be less puzzling, more consistent, with
> >less contradictions.
>
> I'm not sure. Remember that the media act to eliminate complexity and
> substitute cliches. It might take a lot of intelligence to see the real
> description of the world as information-theoretically simpler than the
> media's.
Even if the media are just giving you a 1-to-1 mapping of reality and
are utterly objective, reality itself might be incompressible. It
wouldn't surprise me if there were some fields where extra data simply
doesn't help at all or have a very small marginal utility - and that
such fields persist even for vastly more advanced perceptual-cognitive
systems.
Good media help us digest information but introduces bias just by being
selective - not showing uninteresting stuff biases our reality picture
to think the world has more of the media-interesting things than the
uninteresting things; c.f. fears of crime among people watching
different amounts of television.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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