In that case, like with the relative ease I have explaining other topics, the problem is that people cannot articulate the insight that will resolve the confusion. In the social skills issue, they either assumed or were unaware of pre-requisites. And even when they were aware of the pre-requisites, they didn't know how you'd go about satisfying them. (Remember Alicorn's infamous advice to "just do internet dating!" and "just sample the 1000s of women your friends can favorably introduce you to!"?)
Either way, the problem could be solved with just a little effort. Once I achieve a skill or ability (including social ones), I'm always able to bring others up to my level by articulating the inferential path therebetween. Yet others cannot do the same for me. Why? Do I really have abnormal skill, or do I just take a few easy steps that others haven't?
Coincidentally, there was a great example of laziness destroying explanatory ability, with the lazy person perfectly fine with that result. On the OB blog, a poster named mtraven "tried" to justify why regulations apply in one case but not another, but gave a woefully inadequate explanation. Another poster and I tried to get him to give a more helpful explanation by saying what other criteria he needed to satisfy.
What's especially interesting is how, in attempting to demonstrate how impossibly difficulty the task of articulating the relevant difference is, he compared it to how "hard" it is to sufficiently explain why prisons are locked while schools are not.
But ... that's easy to explain, and I showed him how. The fact that he sees both as hard tells more about his own effort than about inherent explanatory difficulty.
(Note: that exchange was also a test of whether people can be persuaded to play fair in debate if you can just be nice to them. In that exchange, Tyrrell was "good cop" to my "bad cop", being far more polite and deferential in making the same criticisms I did. Did that do anything to perusade mtraven to unlock his monopoly on the knowledge he claimed to have? No.)
I think you have an unusual skill.
If what you can do were common, do you think LW would need so much rationality 101 material?
Possible test: find a person who doesn't seem to be making obvious inferences. Teach them how to do so. Ask them how their thinking has changed.
If you do teach them, my bet is that their answer will be at least as much about having efficient methods of knowing what to pay attention to as it is about putting in more effort.
If you don't succeed at teaching them, it might suggest that you have a non-obvious skill.
Why did you decide tha...
Hello fellow Less Wrongians!
Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:
I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:
I wanted to created this thread as a center for questions you might have about my faith. This is not an attempt to preach -- I would be perfectly happy not having a discussion purely about religion at all. But since there seem to be many comments, well, fire away.
Some basic facts: I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.
Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)
(Thanks Kevin for the suggestion.)
Edit: Wow, there are a lot of comments. This has been a helpful chance to clarify my thinking. I hope you have learned something useful -- perhaps using the question is 'Is there anything surprising here that he said?'.
Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.
Why do you believe? It's a combination of
I would estimate that before this all happened, my odds ratio was about 2000:1, and now it's about 1:10. I would ballpark the odds ratios of each of the above 3 events as ~12.5:1, ~25:1, and ~62.5:1. (I was considering likelihood but didn't think in that precise of terms at the time, so any concretization is open to charges of ex post facto. And these are still ballparks.)
There are lots of arguments against Mormonism on factual and historical grounds; there are also counterarguments which I feel pretty much balance them out. (The feeling of balancing each other out was contemporaneous.)
What things could make you consider leaving the faith?
Why do you think your conversion story is disappointing to many of us?
Several possible reasons:
[1] Specifically: