ESR's insight is almost trivial on the surface, but reveals a deep understanding in the same sort of way Eliezer Yudkowsky demystifies most nonsense philosophic

ESR's insight is almost trivial on the surface, but reveals a deep understanding in the same sort of way Eliezer Yudkowsky demystifies most nonsense philosophical questions. http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid... http://lesswrong.com/lw/of/dissolving_the_question/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/of/dissolving_the_question/ The real problem to address is not finding the answer to "mysterious" questions, but understanding the algorithm that makes our brain categorize those questions as such. I have had somewhat the same realization ESR gives here, but never so transparently elucidated. With no irony, I translate the statement he addresses into a mathematical like nature: "Out of formal models capable of giving predictive powers to informal models, there exists a (unique?) maximally such predictive model." Proving the maximality is then easy if we simply define "maximally predictive" to be "best we've done so far!" (I do not think it is an interesting question to ask whether there is some sort of fuzzy idea of partial order on predictive power, or if this partial order has multiple maximal elements.) The existence statement is the real beautiful reduction, to me, showing the absurdity of the original question. What ESR describes to me is precisely a kind of selection bias; we ignore talking about "predictive formal models" for all the situations mathematics has not come galloping in as saviour! This latter argument is eerily similar to one of the arguments given forth by Dawkins when I read his The God Delusion as a child and turned atheist. Namely, the idea that I was already an atheist to every other religion out there, so why not go one further? The power of such arguments to actually sway and rethink my opinion as an advertised rationalist makes me tremble in their powers, curious whether this effectiveness is deserved, or somehow a way to hack a rationalist's brain. I feel and believe ESR answered reasonably well the question he also posed fairly well, but my mind can't help screaming "Is an almost trivial reformulation really all there is to it?!" This is not so much my expression of doubt as of awe.