David_Gerard 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: shokwave 05 December 2010 04:08:50PM 2 points [-]

You may consider them fools and come up with a string of reasons not to take them seriously (and I am likely to agree), but that doesn't get any typos fixed, and I'm assuming that's the actual aim.

Off-topic, but I have run across this line of thinking recently, in regards to Wikileaks for example. Some expressed the view that since people on average are not good at dealing with information (jump to conclusions, cherry-pick to support hating or loving conclusion x, etc), revealing all this information actually makes people make worse decisions.

I couldn't articulate it at the time, but I feel like the reason people aren't good with information is because we don't give them enough, and that if we gave them this amount of information regularly, they would develop the skills to use it properly.

Something similar for blunt communication. People aren't good with it, so don't do it vs people aren't good with it, so do it to let them learn to be good with it.

Comment author: David_Gerard 05 December 2010 05:35:58PM *  0 points [-]

On the subject of Wikileaks, I strongly recommend this blog post and the 2006 paper it analyses. Assange sets out in detail precisely what he's trying to achieve and how he plans to do it. It's the roadmap for Wikileaks. Casual commentators on the subject, particularly in the media, seem almost completely unaware of it.

On a personal note, I was somewhat perturbed to discover that Wikileaks is slightly my fault. Um, whoops.[/brag]