Followup to:  Artificial Addition, The Outside View's Domain

Where did I acquire, in my childhood, the deep conviction that reasoning from surface similarity couldn't be trusted?

I don't know; I really don't.  Maybe it was from S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, or even Van Vogt's similarly inspired Null-A novels.  From there, perhaps, I began to mistrust reasoning that revolves around using the same word to label different things, and concluding they must be similar?  Could that be the beginning of my great distrust of surface similarities?  Maybe.  Or maybe I tried to reverse stupidity of the sort found in Plato; that is where the young Eliezer got many of his principles.

And where did I get the other half of the principle, the drive to dig beneath the surface and find deep causal models?  The notion of asking, not "What other thing does it resemble?", but rather "How does it work inside?"  I don't know; I don't remember reading that anywhere.

But this principle was surely one of the deepest foundations of the 15-year-old Eliezer, long before the modern me.  "Simulation over similarity" I called the principle, in just those words.  Years before I first heard the phrase "heuristics and biases", let alone the notion of inside views and outside views.