ChrisHibbert comments on Verbal Overshadowing and The Art of Rationality - Less Wrong

63 Post author: pangloss 27 April 2009 11:39PM

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Comment author: ChrisHibbert 29 April 2009 02:10:36AM *  0 points [-]

I think most of the wine experts who work on their verbal ability to describe wines are wine reviewers who read other people's wine reviews. I would guess that that means they develop a common vocabulary. In that sense, I'd presume that they'd be almost as good at recognizing a wine from another expert's description as their own. Or at least that's what I'd want to verify in order to see if they were describing something that's in the wine rather than some idiosyncratic feature that's salient to one but unnoticed by others.

I think the implications for rationalists who want to train their verbal abilities are obvious, but I'll say it anyway. If you want to train your verbal abilities so what you say about rationality doesn't cloud your non-verbal understanding, you have to write about rationality and read what others write about it, and do your best to see that you're talking about the same thing.