From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 11:26:25 MDT
> (Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>):
> 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.
Friedman calls this "rational ignorance"--situations in which the cost
of acquiring accurate information exceeds its value. Increasing
transparency lowers the cost of acquiring most information, but there
is still the cost of understanding it, remembering it, and applying it
to one's life. The only way to bring those costs down is intelligence
enhancement. Until we have both, some "simplifications" of reality
will continue to be valuable guides to action, despite the risk of
mistakenly relying on their inaccuracies.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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