Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
I upvoted this comment, but I want to add an important caveat. Whether, and how much, you trust your own judgment over that of an expert should depend at least in part on the degree to which you think your situation is unusual.
The IT guy wants you to shut up and go away, but (if in fact he is an expert and not a trained monkey reading a script) he's not going to spout random nonsense at you just to get you to leave. He's going to tell you things relevant to what is, in his experience, the usual situation.
Consider well whether you're sure your problem is some special snowflake. The IT guy has seen a lot of issues. Sometimes he can, before you finish your first sentence, know exactly what your problem is and how to fix it, and if he sounds bored when he tells you "just reboot it", that doesn't mean that he's wrong. If it costs you little, try his advice first.
This brings up another related problem, namely how often supposed "experts" actually aren't.