The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime.
Robin Hanson, ‘The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier’, in Damien Broderick (ed.), Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, New York, 2008, p. 168
Without some basis for believing that the process that produced your prior was substantially better at tracking truth than the process that produced other peoples’ priors, you appear to have no basis for believing that beliefs based on your prior are more accurate than beliefs based on other peoples’ priors.
Robin Hanson, ‘Uncommon Priors Require Origin Disputes’, Theory and Decision, vol. 61, no. 4 (December, 2006), p. 326
Apparently, beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps us to project.
Robin Hanson, ‘Enhancing Out Truth Orientation’, in Nick Bostrom & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford, 2009, p. 358