The belief that it's difficult to be completely right, encourages people to look for that gap that is "wrong" and then drive a wedge into it and expand it until it's all that's being talked about.
Sure, if you're running in debate mode and thinking in terms of 'sides' or 'us versus them' and trying to 'win', then that might be something to do. Solution: don't do that in the first place.
If 95% is correct and 5% is wrong
Don't worry, everything you believe is almost certainly wrong - don't expect to find yourself in the 95% correct state any time soon. We're running on corrupted hardware in the first place, and nowhere near the end of science. We can reduce hardly any of our high-level concepts to their physical working parts.
But what about when we apply those concepts to others - as is our tendency due to the self serving bias and the group serving bias?
First, fix those too.
Sure, if you're running in debate mode and thinking in terms of 'sides' or 'us versus them' and trying to 'win', then that might be something to do. Solution: don't do that in the first place.
Indeed, a valuable point. So what's up with the score keeping system of LW then. It encourages thinking in terms of sides and competition. -1, not my side, +1 my side. -1 lost, +1 won.
...Don't worry, everything you believe is almost certainly wrong - don't expect to find yourself in the 95% correct state any time soon. We're running on corrupted hardware in the fi
When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.
How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
The principle of the bottom line is that only the actual causes of your beliefs determine your effectiveness as a rationalist. Once your belief is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the truth-value; once your decision is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the consequences.
You might think that you could arrive at a belief, or a decision, by non-rational means, and then try to justify it, and if you found you couldn’t justify it, reject it.
But we change our minds less often—much less often—than we think.
I’m sure that you can think of at least one occasion in your life when you’ve changed your mind. We all can. How about all the occasions in your life when you didn’t change your mind? Are they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera, et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it’s probably going to stay there.
1Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, “The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence,” Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 3 (1992): 411–435.