Nornagest comments on Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries - Less Wrong

7 Post author: calcsam 22 June 2011 10:52AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 22 June 2011 07:04:47PM *  2 points [-]

There are two ways I can make sense of that quote: first, by assuming that Lewis's "that which is false or unhelpful" has already been excluded by the time it reaches you, allowing you to turn your critical (by a conventional definition) faculties off and absorb a known-good set of data; and second, by shifting the burden of evaluation entirely to intuition and consciously accepting (humbly and uncommentatingly) only what feels intuitively sound. Neither seems suitable for what we're doing here; quite aside from any philosophical objections, we don't have a known-good set that's good enough to propagate without caveats, and the kind of knowledge we work with is very frequently counterintuitive.