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.

btrettel comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2015 03:28PM

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

Comments (236)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: btrettel 30 July 2015 11:35:18PM *  6 points [-]

Addressing common misconceptions is worthwhile, and lists are a good way to do it. You can find similar lists in the academic literature for many different subjects, e.g., here's an article about common misconceptions in thermodynamics. I've also mentioned math books listing counterexamples before. Many counterexamples address common misconceptions.

I like to create Anki cards for common misconceptions, to make sure I don't makes these mistakes myself. One issue with this is whether correcting specific cases causes my brain to recognize a more general case. I'm not sure it always does, but this is better than nothing. I try to include problem solving in my daily life partly as a way to make my beliefs propagate (e.g., I could realize that something is an example of a principle I have a card for).

Edit: Also, to be pedantic, many of the problems listed in the links above would most charitably be called approximations. Programmers might make these because of laziness, for example. Calling them false beliefs could be misleading as the programmer could know something is false but not care about corner cases.