Thread by @yashkaf

"All this predictive processing in Rationality sounds like boring nerd bullshit."

OK, how about the fact that it opens the door to REVELATION within the paradigm of Rationality?

@Conaw, @tweetsbenedict, and @Aella_Girl, I think you'll like this mini-thread.

Rationality sets the stage by centering the map-territory distinction. You don't have to believe in miracles out in intersubjective reality to have crazy things in your map. But Rationality preaches incremental, Bayesian updates with every piece of data. Our minds can't do that.

PP says that we change our minds like Kuhn's theory of science. Errors of prediction accumulate until a great paradigm shift changes the top models all at once. It happens even at small scales, with basic perception: putanumonit.com/2021/01/23/con…

If some global model is revealed to you that slots all the little errors into place at once, you will make this huge update on the spot. It doesn't matter if it came from looking at careful data or while high on LSD or on the road to Damascus.

It's a mistake to think that if someone comes out of an acid trip saying that "all is Love, man" that's some "fake" sense of insight that just feels from inside like real wisdom. Your brain cares very much about making good predictions, and the new insight is doing that.

Of course, this insight may be impossible to communicate to others. A model that neatly fits *your* observed data and makes good predictions isn't one that can always be explained to others, and the glimpses of it they hear will not match *their* observations.

The insight is good if it makes good predictions for you. From the insight it feels like the world makes sense, and is a forum for meaningful action. If it can't be written up in a LessWrong post, your brain don't care.

So if you spend a long time carefully observing the world, noticing your confusion, and growing uneasy at the pieces that don't fit, you won't always be able to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes the truth will be revealed to you all at once in a dream.

And sometimes the truth will sound like religion or New Age spirituality or something else that Eliezer would sneer at. But that can be just because the words floating around in your culture are the ones you reach for. "God" means very different things to different people.