Vladimir_Nesov comments on How do you notice when you're rationalizing? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: AnnaSalamon 02 March 2012 07:28AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 March 2012 02:21:07AM *  1 point [-]

Particularly in programming, it's very useful to think of elements of a project (of varying scale) as knowing certain things, understanding certain ideas, having certain skills or ensuring certain properties. Once you have enough skill, many subtasks can be thought of as explaining some idea to the program or teaching it to do new tricks. (I'm not talking about anything AI-related, just normal software development.)

(My statement you quoted is somewhat wrong, it could instead either act as referring to the hypothetically more common rationalization dynamic that I don't observe much, or else should be changed to "once considered, an idea wants to take up more attention than it's probably worth".)