orthonormal comments on The Correct Contrarian Cluster - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 December 2009 10:01PM

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Comment author: cousin_it 23 December 2009 10:07:37AM *  3 points [-]

I just worked through this stuff. Chu-Carroll and Tao describe different mechanisms of traveling faster than the wind and they're both right. Chu-Carroll gives a more detailed explanation here. In Tao's post, one only needs to parse Figure 4 to be convinced.

In this and other similar cases, restricting ourselves to only meta-level arguments seems unwise. What good is memorizing that DDFTTW is possible because Tao said it is, compared to actually understanding the matter? A good contrarian-cluster question should be more difficult on the object level.

Comment author: orthonormal 23 December 2009 07:38:04PM *  0 points [-]

Yes, I'm combining two distinct things here— but both problems have the same characteristics, and might separate out some clusters of contrarians by the heuristics they favor. The fact that one of these heuristics might be "sit down and actually work out the problem yourself" isn't a bad feature.

EDIT: Oops, "confute" doesn't mean "combine" at all.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 23 December 2009 11:50:57PM 1 point [-]

You might have been thinking of "conflate".

Comment author: orthonormal 24 December 2009 06:01:38AM *  0 points [-]

Yep, that's the one. ETA: Thanks!