a blog on potentially game-changing ideas in science and philosophy
Self-driving cars, autonomous cars, driverless cars – regardless of what you want to call them – are expected to revolutionize the entire automobile industry. They will also transform a host of philosophical puzzles into practical problems.
Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to rationally assess the probability of a certain statement of interest being true, given some evidence. Insofar as science consists in creating hypotheses, collecting evidence for and against them, and updating our credence in these hypotheses in the face of the collected evidence, Bayes’ Theorem formalizes the very process of doing science.
It seems that God would let us know why he allowed so much evil if he existed and had good reasons for allowing it. Not doing so might cause unnecessary suffering, doubt, and uncertainty among believers. This can be turned into an argument against God’s existence.
It’s possible to be mistaken about one’s own values. A common instance of it is when we think we care about something, while in fact what we truly (i.e. under reflection) care about is something else, something that merely happens to correlate in most typical situations with the thing that we would care about in all situations.
It’s in the interest of agents to achieve their own goals as well as possible. When we implement this in our behavior, we are acting rationally. But what does this mean in an applied setting, acting so as to best achieve our goals?
Each day every one of us faces decision problems. Many of these decision problems are not solved consciously – we simply choose an option intuitively, without thinking much about it. But we better not rely on this approach when it comes to high-stakes decisions.
The human brain is a liar that relentlessly sabotages our success. For all its complex brilliance, the brain stumbles into a number of cognitive traps with astonishing regularity. The more often it does so, the less often we are able to achieve what we truly want.
The idea of Anti-Epistemology revolves around three basic elements: the distinction between cherished beliefs and ordinary beliefs, the claim that beliefs are not isolated but stand in confirmation and disconfirmation relations to each other, and the idea that there are bad ways of resolving tension between beliefs…