khafra comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong

82 [deleted] 05 September 2010 06:08PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 06 September 2010 02:19:21AM 14 points [-]

I note that most critics of cousin_it's recent proof (to pick a recent example) were themselves wrong. I think we can expect the typical critic to be wrong, for these reasons:

  • People tend to be biased towards believing ideas that, if widely accepted, would elevate their own social status.
  • People are often not smart enough to see the inherent logic in the thing that they're criticizing. This may be a proof, or a social institution (such as the markets that Marxists criticize) that has has been designed or evolved to serve vital functions.
  • People overestimate their own abilities. When they fail to see an inherent logic in something, they often erroneously infer that such logic doesn't exist.

So I would qualify your conclusion a bit: let's not encourage all criticism blindly, let's encourage only correct criticism.

Comment author: khafra 06 September 2010 05:08:26PM 0 points [-]

Perhaps several of the paragraphs in the post should have "employing heuristics to identify the correct contrarian cluster" tacked on to the end of them.