Darmani comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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Comments (231)
Candidate 1: "If a trillion trillion trillion people each flip a hundred coins, someone's going to get all heads." ("If a trillion people each flip a billion coins" might be a stronger meme, though extremely inaccurate.)
Candidate 2: "Knowing the right answer is better than being the first to argue for it."
Candidate 3: "If it moves, you can test it."
Those are catchy! Of course none of those is an explanation that most people can use -- the inferential distance is pretty big -- but they'd make great sound-bite segues to a slightly longer explanation.
If you just hit someone with a zinger like that, it'll feel to them that you're just scoring points, and they might get annoyed; but if you use it as the start of a discussion, that's likely to be perceived as more respectful.
I like 1 and 3 but I'm dubious about 2. I am not convinced that it is true in the case of most humans. I'd like it to be but most people live sufficiently in a social reality that actually being right is not all that important.
"Learning the right answer is better than having come up with the wrong one"?