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shminux comments on MIT Challenge: blogger to attempt CS curriculum on own - Less Wrong
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Comments (43)
What a fine rationality quote.
The second sentence is. The first sentence isn't.
What do you mean? Should one try to hide their ignorance instead? I do not follow.
Yes, a lot of the time hiding ignorance is more instrumentally useful than exposing your ignorance.
The first sentence talks about "living smart". The second sentence talks about "the way to be right, in the long-term". Those are two very different things. Relatively few people have the latter as a their core life goal and it would be a stretch to say that it constitutes 'living smart' even then. (Note: I'm one of them but that changes nothing!)
I suppose instrumental depends on whom you're exposing it to. :)
I good general philosophy.
It is always more useful to expose your own ignorance to yourself, which is what the author implies, then to indulge in self-deception.
That isn't evident in the quote.
Today you are shown to be wrong. On any given day, you are shown to be wrong. By induction, you are wrong every day. If you never get to "not wrong today!" then you're not getting more rational. There's improvements (wrong every day but the questions are harder each day or something) but the line as it stands sounds superficially deep but in practice is not rationality-focused.
Not necessarily. Finding out you're incorrect about some fact of the world is a first step to uncovering a truth, indeed in the case of a dichotomy, being incorrect about a fact instructs you on the correct truth. So if you were shown to be wrong about fact A, you are almost always closer to a true belief, even if it simply the absence of a false one.
Also, being shown to be wrong every day does not mean shown to be wrong about the same thing. Each day you could be shown to be wrong about a different thing, and each error can lead to updates in your mental model for how the world works.
Although I love the pointless dissection over a single sentence, the phrase is ambiguous as most phrases are. So superficial would be the right word to describe most aphorisms, as being merely pointers to a more nuanced set of beliefs. Don't sweat the small stuff.
That's an argument against the second sentence, not the first. (So you disagree with wedrifid.)
I do too! That ... is one hell of a misreading.
edit: There are improvements that can fix the first sentence too! (exposing your ignorance to testing, to falsification, etc).