Comment on What big goals do we have?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:29:38 GMT

I disagree with this comment.

Your objection is reasonable. It is often considered impolite to analyze people based on their words, especially in public. It is often taken to be a slight on the recipient's status, as you took it.

As an actual disagreement with Vladimir you are simply mistaken. In the raw literal sense humans are non-mysterious, reducible objects. More importantly, in the more practical sense that Vladimir makes the claim you are, as a human being, predictable in many ways. Your thinking can be predicted with some confidence to operate with known failure modes that are consistently found in repeated investigations of other humans. Self reports in particular are known to differ from reliable indicators of state if taken literally and their predictions of future state are even worse.

If you told me, for example, that you would finish a project two weeks before the due date I would not believe you. If you told me your confidence level in a particular prediction you have made on a topic in which you are an expert then I will not believe you. I would expect that you, like that majority of experts, were systematically overconfident in your predictions.

Orthonormal may be mistaken in his prediction about your nihilist tendencies but Vladimir is absolutely correct that you are a non-mysterious human being, with all that it entails.

I used to believe people of any authority when they told me something that contradicted my internal experience, and endlessly questioned my own perception.

It gives me a warm glow inside whenever I hear of someone breaking free from that trap.

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