LawrenceC comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (236)
"... beware of false dichotomies. Though it's fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest."
Practically everyone is wary of false dichotomies. The trick is recognizing them. This quote doesn't help much with that.
Practically everyone can be relied upon to go from "That's a false dichotomy" to "Therefore, I should be wary of it."
However, being wary of false dichotomies means thinking, "That's a dichotomy. Therefore, the probability that it is false is sufficient to justify my thinking it through carefully and analytically." That is not something that practically everyone can be relied upon to do in general.
I don't think the quote significantly increases the probability someone will have that thought. I think practically everyone here already has that habit of wariness. Maybe I'm wrong, typical mind fallacy, but identifying false dichotomies has always been rather automatic for me and I thought that was true for everyone (except when other biases are involved as well).