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Belief in Belief — LessWrong

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Carl Sagan once told a parable of someone who comes to us and claims: “There is a dragon in my garage.” Fascinating! We reply that we wish to see this dragon—let us set out at once for the garage! “But wait,” the claimant says to us, “it is an invisible dragon.” Now as Sagan points out, this doesn’t make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Perhaps we go to the claimant’s garage, and although we see no dragon, we hear heavy breathing from no visible source; footprints mysteriously appear on the ground; and instruments show that something in the garage is consuming oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. But now suppose that we say to the claimant, “Okay, we’ll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breathing,” and the claimant quickly says no, it’s an inaudible dragon. We propose to measure carbon dioxide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We propose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it outlines an invisible dragon, and the claimant immediately

x Belief in Belief — LessWrong Fake Beliefs Self-Deception Alief Anticipated Experiences Belief In Belief Motivated Reasoning Rationality Frontpage 245 Belief in Belief by Eliezer Yudkowsky 29th Jul 2007 5 min read 179 245 Carl Sagan once told a parable of someone who comes to us and claims: “There is a dragon in my garage.” Fascinating! We reply that we wish to see this dragon—let us set out at once for the garage! “But wait,” the claimant says to us, “it is an invisible dragon.” Now as Sagan points out, this doesn’t make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Perhaps we go to the claimant’s garage, a

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