Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 January 2010 04:35PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2010 08:08:42PM 6 points [-]

I had to be dragged through most of the sequences, chipping away one dumb idea after another, until I Got It.

Wow - you Got It after a lot of hard work? That must put you in the bottom 99.9% of all rationalists! I think you might be suffering from a bit of underconfidence here.

Comment author: LauralH 06 February 2013 02:28:01AM 1 point [-]

You mean most people don't read the Sequences and go "Yeah, that's exactly right!"

Hmm.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 January 2010 11:48:42AM 0 points [-]

Wow - you Got It after a lot of hard work?

More like a lot of small insights. Clicks - but with all the data "in cache", as loaded up by you and neatly lined up to connect.

I think you might be suffering from a bit of underconfidence here.

I don't think I'm "the worstest rationalist ever", just that I have a major problem clicking spontaneously from raw data. This seems to me to be the key skill of insight - drawing together a lot of local understandings into a global explanatory pattern. If I could crack this, I think my functional IQ would go up quite a bit.