= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (115)
This needs a lot more work before it's a great essay. The way I would write it is basically 'a classic evolutionary explanation of religion is overactive false-positive agent-detection; here's quotes from several books by the likes of Daniel Dennett etc and also here's a few studies courtesy of gwern about kids; now that we understand the idea and find it plausible, let me extend it to... conspiracy theories! and so on.'
Aha! So you clearly see the potential for greatness. ;)
I will try to improve it.
Excellent observation, I didn't think of the obvious parallels. I think someone just considering religion could easily stumble upon these conclusion but that wasn't the road I travelled. I spent a lot of time comparing various different conspiracy theories and researching the psychology behind them.
I see rather a lot of typos and incomplete sentences.
This jumped out at me. There were several others.
This is filled with incomplete sentences.
Overall, I liked the ideas here, but the writing made them hard to follow. I'm also troubled by the lack of examples (see Douglas_Knight's comment below).
Based on feedback I've changed the above paragraph into:
"Putting aside such wild speculation, what should we take away from this? When do conspiracy theories seem more likely than they are?
When you see these features you probably find the theory more plausible than it is. "
Is this an improvement?
Somewhat.
First bullet: join the two phrases with either "and" or "or". Also, you seem to have at least two (possibly three) antecedents for "it" in those bullets. I suspect removing all four instances would be clearer.
Great suggestions, thank you. I will try to avoid such mistakes in future writing. I'm just wondering however, how I can get rid of it in this sentence:
"Thinking about it significantly strains cognitive resources"
Don't remove the sentence; replace "it" with its antecedent. In other words, answer the question "thinking about what?". Thinking about the conspiracy theory? The actual sequence of events that happened? Or the non-conspiracy explanation for those events? That's what I meant for all four bullet points.
As a general rule, "it" is fine when the intended antecedent is in the same sentence, and there is only one such antecedent for all instances of "it" in a single sentence. Multiple distinct instances in one sentence, or an unambiguous antecedent earlier in the same paragraph, can often be fine, but should be scrutinized more closely. Antecedents that don't appear in the same paragraph are generally a bad idea. (As always, there are exceptions and details. But that's a good starting point.)
Thank you very much for your patience, thinking about language really isn't my thing, I think the OP is now much better due to your advice.
Please PM me so I can fix them! I've been very grateful to the proofreaders so far. :)
By the time I read your comment this sentence was already complete. Are you sure you didn't misread it? I did several corrections and minor edits since posting the original article so maybe I fixed it and forgot about it.
That paragraph was originality one long sentence, after gwern's comment I broke it up to make it more readable. Would a list be better?
This was intended as a feature rather than a bug. But if many people are bothered by this maybe should make a follow up post that analyses several examples to see where they conform or not to the features described here.
"Our" is incorrect here. It think you mean "ours".
Ah! Fixed.
I think starting with religion would be a mistake, for standard 'politics is the mindkiller' reasons.