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Morendil comments on Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help) - Less Wrong Discussion

24 Post author: lukeprog 20 November 2011 05:18AM

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Comment author: Morendil 20 November 2011 03:54:07PM 15 points [-]

Something bothers me about this post. Querying my mind for "what bothers me about this post", the items that come up are:

  • the post starts with a pretty picture of a "web of beliefs", but is itself a long string of words
  • the picture is decorative, but certainly not illustrative; it is not a picture of your beliefs
  • the post offers some beliefs that you claim are connected, but none of the reasoning behind the claims
  • the post offers anecdotes, e.g. "successful businessmen may have this trait more often than others", but does not represent them as beliefs in a web of beliefs

The general theme appears to be "this post doesn't practice what it preaches".

If you did represent the beliefs you mention in this post in the form of a connected web, what would that look like?

(On a very few prior occasions I've tried such explicit representations, and was not motivated to keep using them.)

Comment author: thomblake 21 November 2011 04:21:47PM 4 points [-]

The general theme appears to be "this post doesn't practice what it preaches".

Indeed, I believe the point of this post was partly to solve that sort of problem. Note it is a request for solutions.

Comment author: Morendil 21 November 2011 05:10:46PM 3 points [-]

Agreed; I wasn't saying that as an objection to the underlying idea. I only wanted to state a few things that were bothering me about the post.

Quite a few of the replies were off-topic, so possibly others have been bothered by some aspects of it too. My idea is that future requests for help along the same lines could be more effective if presented in a less troublesome form.

The part where I do my best to respond to the request is the last couple lines.

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