= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Proper posture for mental arts - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (39)
Thanks for the post.
One difference that might make good mental posture more difficult than good physical posture is that we have instincts for good physical posture-- you can learn about good movement by studying animals and 3 year old children. It isn't obvious that there's anything like that for thinking.
Animals maybe, but 3 year old children? They can barely run without falling over.
Right, it seems like people actually have instincts for bad mental posture more than for good mental posture.
Still, I think it might not be too difficult to look at ourselves and determine when we are using good mental postures and bad ones.
For example, consider conversations. Pretty much everyone has had good conversations and bad conversations. In the bad ones, they degenerate (in the worst cases) into you and your conversational partner straight out contradicting each other, insulting each other, talking about each other's motivations and unreasonableness, and so on. In the good ones, each of you point out the good points made by the other and very possibly converge on something close to the truth. In the best conversations I've had, sometimes one of us reversed his position and jumped to defending a position more extreme than the one held by the other -- exactly the kind of "absurdity" predicted by Aumann's agreement theorem for rational conversation partners.
And we usually know even while it's happening whether we're engaging in the reasonable kind of conversation or the unreasonable kind.