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cwillu comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)
It's even more useful to you when they turn out to be right. (As happened to me with sailing upwind faster than the wind, and with Peter deBlanc's 2007 theorem about unbounded utility functions.)
Reversed Stupidity?
In writing, I often notice that it's easier to let someone else come up with a bad draft and then improve it - even if "improving" means "rewrite entirely". Seeing a bad draft provides a basic starting point for your thoughts - "what's wrong here, and how could it be done better". Contrast this to the feeling of "there's an infinite amount of ways by which I could try to communicate this, which one of them should be promoted to attention" that a blank paper easily causes if you don't already have a starting point in mind.
You could explain the phenomenon either as a contraining of the search space to a more tractable one, or as one of the ev-psych theories saying we have specialized modules for finding flaws in the arguments of others. Or both.
Over in the other thread, Morendil mentioned that a lot of folks who have difficulty with math problems don't have any good model of what to do and end up essentially just trying stuff out at random. I wonder if such folks could be helped by presenting them with an incorrect attempt to answer a problem, and then asking them to figure out what's wrong with it.
Here are two excellent examples of what you just explained, as per the Fiction Identity Postulate:
*Doom, Consequences of Evil as the "bad draft", and this as the done-right version.
*Same for this infuriating Chick Tract and this revisiting of it (it's a Tear Jerker)
*And everyone is familiar with the original My Little Pony works VS the Friendship Is Magic continuity.
I don't think so. In this context, it seems that Scott is talking about in this context making his mathematical intuitions more precise by trying to state explicitly what is wrong with the idea. He seems to generally be doing this in response to comments by other people sort of in his field (comp sci) or connected to his field (physics and math ) so he isn't really trying to reverse stupidity.
People come up with ideas that are clearly and manifestly wrong when they're confused about the reality. In some cases, this is just personal ignorance, and if you ask the right people they will be able to give you a solid, complete explanation that isn't confused at all (evolution being a highly available example.)
On the other hand, they may be confused because nobody's map reflects that part of the territory clearly enough to set them straight, so their confusion points out a place where we have more to learn.
It points to where the ripe bananas are, huh? Thanks, that was clarifying.
Seems more like harnessing motivated cognition, so long as opposite arguments aren't privileged as counterarguments.
Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, but it's not a bad place to start.
It is a bad place to start. The intended sense of "reversed" in "reversed stupidity" is that you pick the opposite, as opposed to retracting the decisions that led to privileging the stupid choice. The opposite of what is stupid is as arbitrary as the stupid thing itself, if you have considerably more than two options.
Not so, I can get very inventive trying to counter what I perceive as wrong or offensive. Disproving sources to offering countering and contradictory postulations; all are better when flung back. One of my great joys is when my snotty, off-hand comment makes someone go after real data to prove me wrong. If this is applied to some theoretical position, who knows where it could lead you. I'm pretty sure there is at least one Edison joke about this.
Vladimir is talking about reversed stupidity in the LW sense; but I don't think it applies to cwillu's quote. Asserting that a false statement is false is not "reversed stupidity".