You Provably Can't Trust Yourself
Eliezer Yudkowsky,
Overcoming Bias,
Aug 22, 2008
This is a pretty complex piece of writing, which the author happily summarizes about halfway through: "As soon as you start trusting yourself, you become unworthy of trust. You'll start believing any damn thing that you think, just because you thought it. This wisdom of the human condition is pleasingly analogous to a precise truth of mathematics." The article looks at variations of what are essentially Godelian arguments that show, essentially, that you can prove anything within a system, but you can't prove the validity of the system itself from within the system. That's why individuals need other individuals, in order to know they've learned, and why political parties need other political parties, for the same reason.
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