Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 September 2012 08:13AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (353)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 02 September 2012 08:08:00PM *  8 points [-]

You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn't matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don't pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won't be pointing out to you).

(You may learn something useful from the sequence on words. See also this post and its dependencies: A Rational Argument.)