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Automaton comments on Rationality Quotes: December 2010 - Less Wrong
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“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
--Nietzsche
Isn't this true for any sort of mountains that are difficult to climb, not just the mountains of truth? For example, training makes you better at lying too!
With this in mind, I suppose the difficult part would be correctly identifying the range you're climbing.
But is being able to lie better of intrinsic value?
Plausibly. There are worse goals to have than maxing your stats.
Yes. Your ability to communicate ideas and to understand ideas doesn't give two beans whether the ideas are true or not. The better you are at lying the better you are at clearly presenting any thought, including thoughts that are true, or neither true nor false.
This is false for the case of clearly presenting deductive arguments, which are a non-zero portion of "thoughts that are true". (They are also probably a lot more significant, on average, than the average thought that is true.)
This is a thread full of evidence that the quoted phrase is either not specific enough, or incorrect for a subset of people.
In my experience, this is true only up to a point.
Yes, there are techniques that work just as well for communicating/understanding truths as for falsehoods. But there are also techniques that work much better for truths than falsehoods.
It would not surprise me if specializing in the latter set of techniques resulted in more progress along those lines than pursuing a more general rhetorical skill.
I'd be very interested to find out more about techniques like that. Would you point me toward a place to start?
Well, one technique that works pretty well along these lines is reporting detailed experimental results demonstrating (or failing to demonstrate) the principle one wants to communicate/understand, and encouraging one's peers to reproduce the experiments.
Not quite as good, but sometimes more accessible, is selecting some theoretical examples of the principle one wants to demonstrate on the basis of a general guideline (rather than a guideline chosen case-by-case so as to return preselected examples) and working one's way rigorously through those examples to see where they lead.
The How to Change Your Mind sequence isn't a bad starting point.
Disregarding cliffs and chasms!