I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the rationality mistakes I’ve made in the past. Here’s an interesting one: I think I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”.
Throughout my life, I’ve often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid. Now that I am older and wiser, I still think I was correct to think that these ideas were repugnant and stupid. Overall I was probably slightly insufficiently dismissive of things like the opinions of apparent domain experts and the opinions of people who seemed smart whose arguments I couldn’t really follow. I also overrated conventional wisdom about factual claims about how the world worked,
Epistemic Status: Pointing at early stage concepts, but with high confidence that something real is here. Hopefully not the final version of this post.
When I started studying rationality and philosophy, I had the perspective that people who were in positions of power and influence should primarily focus on how to make good decisions in general and that we should generally give power to people who have demonstrated a good track record of general rationality. I also thought of power as this mostly unconstrained resource, similar to having money in your bank account, and that we should make sure to primarily allocate power to the people who are good at thinking and making decisions.
That picture has changed a lot over the years. While I think there is still...
Interesting. I have no such experience with power, and I somewhat came to... not the opposite conclusion, exactly?
I noticed a lot how incentives are important. for example. I really dislike judging people by words and intentions instead of deeds, because I believe it encourage self-lies, creating conscious self that run in sandbox, as described in The hostile telepaths problem.
(I somewhat see integrity as something related to integration of the different parts of self, and integration of information and commitments across all different aspects of the...
I like the sentiment of this post that "noticing other people is wrong does not make you right", which is very close to a sentiment I've been thinking about, that it should be easier to point out uncertainty without providing replacement certainty. I feel this especially about AI risk, I often wanted to point out other peoples lack of knowledge about how to proceed with AI, even though I had no replacement plan. The general idea is people shouldn't need to know X as a requirement to claim that another person does not know X.
... (read more)