pjeby comments on Unteachable Excellence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 March 2009 03:33PM

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Comment author: pjeby 06 March 2009 04:08:01PM 3 points [-]

Perhaps I should've given an example: you can easily teach that the "right thing" is to run a profitable business, whose income exceeds its expenses, whose customers are fans of it, etc., etc. You can even teach in minute detail how each of these pieces is achieved.

What you can't do is prevent all the ways that people can go and apply that "right" knowledge in the wrong way. The Dilbert comic strip is full of such examples, of people taking good ideas about how to run a business, and turning them into voodoo.

It's "Guessing The Teacher's Password" -- you can't stop someone with the wrong idea already in their head, from taking what you tell them and processing it through that existing wrong idea, thereby making it wrong.