The appropriateness of that probably depends on what kind of question it is...
I guess it is slightly more acceptable if it's a binary question. But even so it's terrible epistimology, since you are giving undue attention to a hypothesis just because it's the first one you came up with.
An equally awful method of doing things: Reading through someone's post and trying to find anything wrong with it. If you find anything --> post criticism, if you don't find anything --> accept conclusion. It's SOP even on Less Wrong, and it's not totally stupid but it's really not what rationalists are supposed to do.
I think my hackles got raised by the claim that your perception is "what it actually is" -- and that's a remarkably strong claim. It probably works better phrased like something along the lines of "trying to take your ego and preconceived notions out of the picture".
Yes, that is a big part of it, but it's more than that. It means you stop seeing things from one specific point of view. Think of how confused people get about issues like free will. Only once you stop thinking about the issue from the perspective of an agent and ask what is actually happening from the perspective of the universe can you resolve the confusion.
Or, if you want to see some great examples of people who get this wrong all the time, go to the James Randi forums. There's a whole host of people there who will say things during discussions like "Well it's your claim so you have the burden of proof. I am perfectly happy to change my mind if you show me proof that I'm wrong." and who think that this makes them rationalists. Good grief.
Any links to egregious examples? :-)
I have spent some time going through your posts but I couldn't really find any egregious examples. Maybe I got you confused with someone else. I did notice that where politics were involved you're overly prone to talking about "the left" even though the universe does not think in terms of "left" or "right". But of course that's not exactly unique to you.
One other instance I found:
Otherwise, I still think you're confused between the model class and the model complexity (= degrees of freedom), but we've set out our positions and it's fine that we continue to disagree.
It's not a huge deal but I personally would not classify ideas as belonging to people, for the reasons described earlier.
burden of proof
In principle I agree with you.
In practice I think "X has the burden of proof" generally means something similar to "The position X is advancing has a rather low prior probability, so substantial evidence would be needed to make it credible, and in particular if X wants us to believe it then s/he would be well advised to offer substantial evidence." Which, yes, involves confusion between an idea and the people who hold it, and might encourage an argument-as-conflict view of things that can work out really badly -- but i...
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: