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.

Will_Newsome comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong Discussion

58 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 April 2012 10:01PM

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

Comments (328)

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

Comment author: Will_Newsome 19 April 2012 02:55:01AM *  10 points [-]

For comparison, the General Chess Heuristic: Think about a move you could make, think about the moves your opponent could make in reply, think about what moves you could make if they replied with any of those candidate moves, &c.; evaluate all possible resultant positions, subject to search heuristics and time constraints.

What's interesting is that novice chess players reliably forget to even consider what moves their opponent could make; their thought process barely includes the opponent's possible thought process as a fundamental subroutine. I think novice rationalists make the same error (where "opponent" is "person or group of people who disagree with me"), and unfortunately, unlike in chess, they don't often get any feedback alerting them to their mistake.

(Interestingly, Roko once almost defeated me in chess despite having significantly less experience than me, because he just thought really hard and reliably calculated a ton of lines. I'd never seen anyone do that successfully, and was very impressed. I would've lost except he made a silly blunder in the endgame. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.)