Grognor

On Saying the Obvious

Related to: Generalizing from One Example, Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help), Beware the Unsurprised The idea of this article is something I've talked about a couple of times in comments. It seems to require more attention. As a general rule, what is obvious to some people may not be obvious to others. Is this obvious to you? Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't, and you thought it was because of hindsight bias. Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list. Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy. The implicit deduction goes like this: "I found <concept> obvious. Thus, <concept> is inherently obvious." The problem is that obviousness, like probability, is in the mind. The stigma of "obvious" ideas has another problem in preventing things from being said at all. I don't know how common this is, but I've actually been afraid of saying things that I thought were obvious, even though ignoring this fear and just posting has yet to result in a poorly-received comment. (That is, in fact, why I'm writing this.) Even tautologies, which are always obvious in retrospect, can be hard to spot. How many of us would have explicitly realized the weak anthropic principle without Nick Bostrom's help? And what about implications of beliefs you already hold? These should be obvious, and sometimes are, but our brains are notoriously bad at putting two and two together. Luke's example was not realizing that an intelligence explosion was imminent until he read the I.J. Good paragraph. I'm glad he provided that example, as it has saved me the trouble of making one. This is not (to paraphrase Eliezer) a thunderbolt of insight. I bring it up

162Feb 2, 2012

Grognor

Message

3459

504

272

15y

Less Wrong on Twitter

List of members of Less Wrong who are on Twitter: * Eliezer Yudkowsky * Steven Kaas * Vladimir Nesov * So8res * Alex Vermeer * Robby Bensinger * Roman Yampolskiy * atucker * Peter de Blanc * Nick Tarleton * Michael Vassar (alt) * Frank Adamek * Kaj Sotala *...

Jun 22, 201232

I Stand by the Sequences

Edit, May 21, 2012: Read this comment by Yvain. > Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture. - Peter de Blanc There's been a lot of talk here lately about how we need better contrarians. I don't agree. I think the Sequences got everything...

May 15, 201216

[link] TEDxYale - Keith Chen - The Impact of Language on Economic Behavior

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiobJhogNnA The short version is that if the language you speak requires different verbs for the present and the future, it causes you to think about it differently. Depending on the magnitude of the effect, this has important implications for construal level theory. If your language allows you to think...

Apr 7, 20125

The Best Comments Ever

Of the title of this discussion post, we already have an approximation in the most voted-for lists for Main and Discussion. There are many problems with this metric, however, a subset of which are: * Both sections are cluttered. The top comments for Main are full of rationality quotes (which...

Mar 18, 201227

[Pile of links] Miscommunication

> Humans obviously can't communicate. -Peter de Blanc Miscommunication is something we talk about Less Wrong a lot, what with the illusion of transparency, the double illusion of transparency, and the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong sequence and better disagreement and levels of communication and mental metadata and this...

Feb 21, 201210

On Saying the Obvious

Feb 2, 2012162

[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions

I thought this video was a really good question dissolving by Richard Feynman. But it's in 240p! Nobody likes watching 240p videos. So I transcribed it. (Edit: That was in jest. The real reasons are because I thought I could get more exposure this way, and because a lot of...

Jan 8, 2012116

Load More (7/8)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Grognor

Grognor

Grognor

On Saying the Obvious

[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions

[Transcript] Tyler Cowen on Stories

Less Wrong on Twitter

Grognor

Less Wrong on Twitter

I Stand by the Sequences

[link] TEDxYale - Keith Chen - The Impact of Language on Economic Behavior

The Best Comments Ever

[Pile of links] Miscommunication

On Saying the Obvious

[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions

On Saying the Obvious

[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions

[Transcript] Tyler Cowen on Stories

Less Wrong on Twitter

Less Wrong on Twitter

I Stand by the Sequences

[link] TEDxYale - Keith Chen - The Impact of Language on Economic Behavior

The Best Comments Ever

[Pile of links] Miscommunication

On Saying the Obvious

[Transcript] Richard Feynman on Why Questions