David_Gerard comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 02 January 2013 05:23PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 01 January 2013 08:20:35PM 11 points [-]

If you'd have told a 14th-century peasant that there'd be a huge merchant class in the future who would sit in huge metal cylinders eating meals and drinking wine while the cylinders hurtled through the air faster than a speeding arrow across oceans and continents to bring them to far-flung business opportunities, the peasant would have classified you as insane. And he'd have been wrong to the tune of a few gazillion frequent-flyer miles.

-- someone on Usenet replying to someone deriding Kurzweil

Comment author: David_Gerard 02 January 2013 12:52:06AM 18 points [-]

In general, though, that argument is the Galileo gambit and not a very good argument.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 02 January 2013 09:50:35AM 8 points [-]

There's a more charitable reading of this comment, which is just "the absurdity heuristic is not all that reliable in some domains."

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 10:17:06AM 14 points [-]

What makes this the Galileo Gambit is that the absurdity factor is being turned into alleged support (by affective association with the positive benefits of air travel and frequent flier miles) rather than just being neutralized. Contrast to http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ where absurdity is being pointed out as a fallible heuristic but not being associated with positives.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 January 2013 11:57:25PM *  1 point [-]

That's the way I interpreted it. (How comes I tend to read pretty much anythingยน charitably?)

  1. Well, not really anything. I don't think I would have been capable of this.
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