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tim comments on Miracle Mineral Supplement - Less Wrong
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This seems to imply that there is something fundamentally different about these humans compared to other humans. I'm not convinced this is the case. I would be rather surprised if you couldn't make the average human drink bleach by exposing them to specifically tailored situations/information.
That's not just arguing from fictional evidence, it's arguing from hypothetical evidence. I don't know, but I've been told that you can get a room full of Jews shouting "Sieg Heil" with a sufficiently rousing version of this. [1] You could probably get people to drink bleach by mislabeling a bottle.
Getting back to the general point, it's not just important to know that an aspect exists, it's important to know how strong it is.
[1] I was told it either by or about Robert Aspirin/Yang the Nauseating. He was quite a good performer.
I think this is a rather uncharitable interpretation of my argument. There is a difference between how strong an effect is and how common it is. If you had said "Another angle on this is that it isn't about humans in general, it's about [a small subset of humans that happened to experience an unfortunate convergence of misinformation and subjective context]" then we would have no disagreement.
I'm not contending that these situations are representative of the human population, but rather that these situations do not require "some of the most gullible humans" to occur.
You could be right.
The thing both of us are leaving out is that deciding what can be trusted is a genuinely hard problem. You can get badly hurt trusting conventional medical advice, too.