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Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”
Real dragon

Imagine that someone tells you they’re keeping a dragon in their house. You tell them you want to see it. They say it’s an invisible dragon. You say fine, you’ll listen to it move. They say it’s an inaudible dragon. You say you’ll throw some cooking flour into the air and see the outline of the dragon. They say the dragon is permeable to flour. And the telling thing is that they know, in advance, exactly which ex-perimental results they’ll have to explain away. They know everything will come out the way it does if there’s no dragon, they know in advance just which excuses they’ll have to make. So maybe they say there’s a dragon. Maybe they believe they believe there’s a dragon, it’s called belief-in-belief. But they don’t actually believe it. You can be mistaken about what you believe, most people never realise there’s a difference between believing something and thinking it’s good to believe it.
logic, mind, sacramental