= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kutta comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong Discussion
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 (428)
I think though that holding crazy beliefs is Bayesian evidence for the hypothesis that a person is not a remarkable intellectual contributor to humanity. Wedrifid's "why should I listen to you?" is thus not addressed head-on by a list of crazy people who happened to achieve other worthy stuff.
If we had no other information about calcsam besides eir religious beliefs, and e were only one of many people potentially worth listening to, and we were processing those many in bulk to try to decide which of them to investigate more expensively closely, then this would be a useful low-cost filter.
However, I don't think it's enough evidence to overcome the other things we do know about em: that e's posting on LW, that e's responding in a generally clear and intelligent manner, etc.
A policy of ignoring people who disagree with you seems like a good way to never notice that you're wrong. And you are wrong -- not necessarily about this particular question, but of all the things you believe there's pretty much guaranteed to be at least one false idea. I'd even go so far as to say that there's probably at least one very important wrong idea in there.
In my opinion, listening to people like calcsam -- intelligent people who disagree with me -- is one of the most plausible vectors for finding out that I'm wrong about something.