Note: The quantitative elements of this post have now been revised significantly.

Followup to: You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event

All three of them clearly killed her. The jury clearly believed so as well which strengthens my argument. They spent months examining the case, so the idea that a few minutes of internet research makes [other commenters] certain they're wrong seems laughable

- lordweiner27, commenting on my previous post

The short answer: it's very much like how a few minutes of philosophical reflection trump a few millennia of human cultural tradition.

Wielding the Sword of Bayes -- or for that matter the Razor of Occam -- requires courage and a certain kind of ruthlessness. You have to be willing to cut your way through vast quantities of noise and focus in like a laser on the signal.

But the tools of rationality are extremely powerful if you know how to use them.

Rationality is not easy for humans. Our brains were optimized to arrive at correct conclusions about the world only insofar as that was a necessary byproduct of being optimized to pass the genetic material that made them on to the next generation. If you've been reading Less Wrong for any significant length of time, you probably know this by now. In fact, around here this is almost a banality -- a cached thought. "We get it," you may be tempted to say. "So stop signaling your tribal allegiance to this website and move on to some new, nontrivial meta-insight."

But this is one of those things that truly do bear repeating, over and over again, almost at every opportunity. You really can't hear it enough. It has consequences, you see. The most important of which is: if you only do what feels epistemically "natural" all the time, you're going to be, well, wrong. And probably not just "sooner or later", either. Chances are, you're going to be wrong quite a lot.

To borrow a Yudkowskian turn of phrase: if you don't ever -- or indeed often -- find yourself needing to zig when, not only other people, but all kinds of internal "voices" in your mind are loudly shouting for you to zag, then you're either a native rationalist -- a born Bayesian, who should perhaps be deducing general relativity from the fall of an apple any minute now -- or else you're simply not trying hard enough.

Oh, and another one of those consequences of humans' not being instinctively ...

GilgameshDeux

GilgameshDeux