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My Kind of Reflection — LessWrong

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In "Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", I concluded that it's okay to use induction to reason about the probability that induction will work in the future, given that it's worked in the past; or to use Occam's Razor to conclude that the simplest explanation for why Occam's Razor works is that the universe itself is fundamentally simple. Now I am far from the first person to consider reflective application of reasoning principles. Chris Hibbert compared my view to Bartley's Pan-Critical Rationalism (I was wondering whether that would happen). So it seems worthwhile to state what I see as the distinguishing features of my view of reflection, which may or may not happen to be shared by any other philosopher's view of reflection. • All of my philosophy here actually comes from trying to figure out how to build a self-modifying AI that applies its own reasoning principles to itself in the process of rewriting its own source code. So whenever I talk about using induction to licens

x My Kind of Reflection — LessWrong Value Theory Reflective Reasoning Rationality Personal Blog 75 My Kind of Reflection by Eliezer Yudkowsky 10th Jul 2008 4 min read 24 75 In " Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom ", I concluded that it's okay to use induction to reason about the probability that induction will work in the future, given that it's worked in the past; or to use Occam's Razor to conclude that the simplest explanation for why Occam's Razor works is that the universe itself is fundamentally simple. Now I am far from the first person to consider reflective application of reaso

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