Desrtopa comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: FAWS 11 April 2012 03:39AM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 12 April 2012 12:35:27PM 1 point [-]

It might be that my own experiences won't generalize to other people, but in domains where I haven't developed an expectation that everyone else really will make mistakes that I didn't, if everyone else is saying I'm wrong, I'll tend to conclude that I'm probably wrong.

I wouldn't exactly say I was untrained though. We learn from our life experiences. I was smarter than the great majority of my peers growing up, and fairly precocious, a stage ahead through my childhood, so seeing people around me believing things that seemed head-in-sand stupid, because the things they believed were actually stupid, as the products of less developed minds, was simply the way of the world as I grew up.

The hard part, which I see reflected among many other people who grew up ahead of their peers, was developing a sense of when you really should expect other people not to be any less sensible than you are.