= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DanArmak comments on Information Hazards and Community Hazards - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (15)
I think a very interesting trait of humans is that we can for the most part collaboratively truth-seek on most issues, except those defined as 'politics', where a large proportion of the population, with varying IQs, some extremely intelligent, believe things that are quite obviously wrong to who anyone who has spent any amount of time seeking the truth on those issues without prior bias.
The ability for humans to totally turn off their rationality, to organise the 'facts' as they see them to confirm their biases, is nothing short of incredible. If humans treated everything like politics, we would certainly get nowhere.
I think a community hazard would, unfortunately, be trying to collaboratively truth-seek about political issues on a forum like LessWrong. People would not be able to get over their biases, despite being very open to changing their mind on all other issues.
This is true not only connotationally (political topics cause humans to behave this way), but also denotationally: those topics which cause humans to behave this way, we call political (or 'tribal').
Nope. Consider the whole wide world of incentives. If a discussion leads to significant real-world results, and not just of political kind, participants have incentives to attempt turn this discussion to their advantage and they regularly do. Truth-seeking is a very common casualty.
For simple examples think about money, sex, etc.