shminux 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: Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 12:51:31AM 3 points [-]

I've noticed my ability to predict my comment karma has gone down in the last few months, the weirdest example being some of my comments fluctuating about ten to fifteen points within a single day, prompting accusations that I had a bunch of sockpuppets and was manipulating the votes. It's weird and I don't have any good explanation for why LW would suddenly start voting in weird ways. As the site gets bigger the median intelligence tends to drop; does anyone know if there's been a surge in registration lately? It's true I've seen an abnormal amount of activity on the "Welcome to Less Wrong" post. I feel like we might be attracting more people that aren't high IQ, autistic, schizotypal, or OCPD, which would be sad.

Comment author: Dmytry 06 March 2012 10:10:34AM *  0 points [-]

I generally treat the votes as a mix of indication of clarity and of how much people like/dislike the notion.

Didn't expect any negatives on this post though; then I assumed something wasn't clear and added the edit. I still think that my point is entirely valid though. Good logic does not allow you to make a fallacious argument even if you want to, and bad logic often leads you to wrong conclusions even when you are genuinely interested in knowing the answer; furthermore the rationalization process doesn't restrict itself to assertions that are false.

Comment author: witzvo 15 July 2012 03:48:14AM *  1 point [-]

Perhaps the concern is that the reduction to a logical question, i.e. to the set of premises and axioms, was the faulty part? After all a valid argument from false premises doesn't help anyone, but I'm sure you know that.