Desrtopa comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong

86 Post author: lionhearted 01 December 2010 08:25AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (420)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: thomblake 03 December 2010 12:25:03AM 2 points [-]

Consider dropping it altogether if it's not a big deal. This about learning to prioritize - I had someone comment on my site thinking mistakenly that The Richest Man in Babylon and The Greatest Salesman in the World were by the same author. It wasn't, but who cares? It makes no difference. It's not worth pointing it out - almost everyone has an aversion to being corrected, so only do it if there's actually tangible gain. Otherwise, go do something more important and not engender the potential bad will.

I consider this particularly selfish and evil. If you know there's a place where someone's map doesn't correspond to the territory, you should tell them before they inadvertently drive off a cliff. Even if it would be a status hit to yourself. And you can't tell me that's a part of their map they weren't even using, as they had just used it!

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 December 2010 04:09:21AM *  3 points [-]

But how much utility does that portion of the map hold for them in any case? That specific mistake seems unlikely to ever have greater repercussions for them than causing a bit of embarrassment, and if you correct them in a public forum, that's exactly what you're going to cause. If you did not provide the correction, there are other ways in which the person might have made the same discovery without as much embarrassment, such as looking one of the authors or books up on Wikipedia, but I suspect that there is a low probability of them ever facing greater repercussions due to their mistake.

If you judge the correction to really have a positive expected utility for them, then it may be for the best, but if you make a general habit of correcting others without considering the necessity of each case, you're liable to lose status to no benefit.