taelor comments on How to Seem (and Be) Deep - Less Wrong

46 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 October 2007 06:13PM

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Comment author: taelor 21 November 2011 11:07:22PM 6 points [-]

I think that this works for two reasons: firstly, people tend to assume that everyone else is working from the same cache as themselves, so when we encounter someone working from non-standard cache, we often assume that the speaker must have thought up everything on his own; secondly, cached wisdom tend to be polished, self-contained and carefully worded for maximum rhetorical effect, whereas original thinking tends to be... not those things. Consequently, when we encounter an unfamiliar bit of cached wisdom, it seems as though the idea must have burst fully formed Athena-style from the speakers brow, when really he's just repeating something he read in a book somewhere that was gradually refined over time by others.