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LawrenceC comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 October 2014 11:02PM

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Comment author: LawrenceC 15 October 2014 03:10:40AM *  5 points [-]

"... 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."

  • Steven Pinker, on page 345 of The Sense of Style.
Comment author: 27chaos 15 October 2014 07:44:33AM 2 points [-]

Practically everyone is wary of false dichotomies. The trick is recognizing them. This quote doesn't help much with that.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 16 October 2014 06:53:23PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: 27chaos 17 October 2014 04:23:19AM *  0 points [-]

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).