Protagoras comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:34PM

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

Comments (326)

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

Comment author: Protagoras 12 March 2014 06:08:13PM 2 points [-]

It's pretty remarkable to detect yourself in that kind of mistake; most people are very good at finding confirming evidence for whatever judgments they've made about people, and ignoring any contrary indications.

Comment author: Salemicus 12 March 2014 06:25:05PM 4 points [-]

Yes, this is a good point - we generally don't realise that we are (self-)deceived, so we can't even begin to think about where we went wrong.

Of course, Elinor Dashwood is something of an authorial stand-in, so it's not really surprising that she's incredibly wise and perspicacious like that.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 29 March 2014 03:46:27PM *  0 points [-]

Yes. This can happen, but what you describe is more common. Once a coworker was sure that I was an ultra-right-wing militiaman, based on one indirect, misleading bit of evidence, ignoring all else.

Merely declaring my general political alignment and support and opposition to various candidates was totally inadequate. I had to explicitly enumerate several political positions to get him to adjust, and even then he seized on the nuances to try to interpret it as my secretly being a right-wing nut.