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trhway | on: Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
imagine if your physical theory of Universe works perfectly for the Universe at all scales, all times, all places except for one small star whose behavior contradicts your theory - that means that your theory at least requires an adjustment and at worst it may be total thrash. Your smoking example doesn't have such contradiction - whether he was anti- or pro-smoker is orthogonal to the rest of the story. On the other hand Trump showing empathy and correcting gross injustice stemming from the gross government corruption doesn't fit well into my perception of Trump and thus seriously challenges it.
wizzwizz4 | parent
If your model of Donald Trump is "cartoonishly evil and incapable of empathy", then yes, of course you need to adjust your model – but that's a bad description of Adolf Hitler, too. He genuinely cared about the welfare of certain people, and opposed smoking because of the harm it caused those people: if you pegged Hitler as generally pro-death, you'd be wrong. But that does not in any way redeem him, and it shouldn't cause you to update your "Hitler wants to kill a whole bunch of people" prediction.

Suppose it's 1940. You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.

"Orthogonal" is subjective. All things are interrelated. That does not mean that our descriptions should be highly-sensitive to noise. Update your internal model of his behaviour, by all means, but if you have predictions that don't require that internal model, consider whether or not this evidence should actually affect those predictions.

trhway | root | parent
>You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.

you've just described orthogonality between his stance on smoking and his real-life mass-murderous actions. And as far as i see it is very objective orthogonality.

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