You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

CronoDAS comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 05 December 2011 08:38AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (266)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Antisuji 06 December 2011 12:11:40AM 3 points [-]

I have a tendency that's possibly related to your #3: when someone makes a factual assertion I immediately consider its negation as a distinct possibility. That is, the negation becomes more available to me, and therefore in some sense more plausible. Else, why make the assertion in the first place?

Comment author: CronoDAS 22 December 2011 10:53:31AM *  4 points [-]

This is actually a pretty good habit to get into when doing math. Lots of plausible-sounding conjectures actually do turn out to be false because math can allow for some pretty strange-seeming things. For example, you can have functions that are continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere, or uncountable sets with length zero, or all kinds of other crazy things.