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.

Desrtopa comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: FAWS 11 April 2012 03:39AM

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

Comments (1221)

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

Comment author: Desrtopa 12 April 2012 12:35:27PM 1 point [-]

It might be that my own experiences won't generalize to other people, but in domains where I haven't developed an expectation that everyone else really will make mistakes that I didn't, if everyone else is saying I'm wrong, I'll tend to conclude that I'm probably wrong.

I wouldn't exactly say I was untrained though. We learn from our life experiences. I was smarter than the great majority of my peers growing up, and fairly precocious, a stage ahead through my childhood, so seeing people around me believing things that seemed head-in-sand stupid, because the things they believed were actually stupid, as the products of less developed minds, was simply the way of the world as I grew up.

The hard part, which I see reflected among many other people who grew up ahead of their peers, was developing a sense of when you really should expect other people not to be any less sensible than you are.