Emile comments on Request: Interesting Invertible Facts - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2010 08:02PM

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Comment author: Emile 09 October 2010 03:15:19PM 4 points [-]

I don't think these are exactly what Eliezer is looking for - these are statements that go against our natural inclinations, whereas I think Eliezer is looking like things that are (as someone said) "obviously correct in both directions", i.e. stuff we could rationalize as true either way upon encountering it.

Comment author: suzanne 10 October 2010 06:54:58PM *  2 points [-]

I know what you mean, and I worried about that when I posted those examples. The problem is that I can't tell if I'm suffering from the hindsight bias when I'm trying to evaluate "Could I believe both this statement and its inverse, regardless of which one was presented as the truth?" In these cases, I can come up with fake rationalisations for both (even though one is more counter-intuitive), which makes me think that they might be invertible. They would need to be tested on people in experiments like the ones in the article by Meyers.