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Annoyance comments on Cascio in The Atlantic, more on cognitive enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
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Comments (77)
But that action is a necessary part of producing a conclusion.
Holding a belief, without first going through the stages of searching for relevant data, is a positive error - one that can be avoided by the simple expedient of not reaching a conclusion before an evaluation process is complete. That costs nothing.
Asserting a conclusion is costly, in more than one way.
Humans hold beliefs about all sorts of things based on little or no thought at all. It can't really be avoided. It might be an open question whether one should do something about unjustified beliefs one notices one holds. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asserting an unjustified belief.
Of course, I'm even using 'unjustified' above tentatively - it would be better to say "insufficiently justified for the context" in which case the problem goes away - certainly seeing what looks like a flower is sufficient justification for the belief that there is a flower, if nothing turns on it.
Not sure which sort of case Roko's is, though.
At each point, you may reach a conclusion with some uncertainty. You expect the conclusion (certainty) to change as you learn more. It would be an error to immediately jump to inadequate levels of certainty, but not to pronounce an uncertain conclusion.