Emile comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Kevin 20 May 2010 07:30PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_M 21 May 2010 08:26:51AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, that's a good point. However, one difference between my idea and the nostalgia biases is that I don't expect that the latter, even if placed under utmost scrutiny, would turn out to be responsible for as many severe and entirely non-obvious false beliefs in practice. My impression is that in our culture, people are much better at detecting biased nostalgia than biased reverence for what are held to be instances of moral and intellectual progress.

Comment author: Emile 21 May 2010 08:40:49AM 2 points [-]

I don't think that nostalgia bias would be harder to detect in general - it's easy to detect in our culture because it isn't a general part of a culture (that seems to be pretty much what you're saying).

However, the opposite may have held for, say, imperial China, or medieval Europe.