But why that seed in this conversation?

To assist in debiasing the ageism that was being expressed in the conversation.

that are a thousand years ahead of western science.

What was the motivation behind this addition? Was it positive?

The motivation was to plant a seed... motivated by the +2 on my comment.

In my experience debiasing others who have strongly held opinions is far more effort than it's worth, a better road seems to be to facilitate them debiasing themselves. Plant the seed and move on, coming back to assess and perhaps water it later on. I don't try to cut down their tree... as it were. http://lesswrong.com/lw/7ep/practical_debiasing/5ah1?context=1#5ah1

TimS, I'm glad we agree on several points, extinction and positive reinforcement of children. I wonder why these methods are espoused for children, yet tend to be used less for "competent adults". Thanks for planting the seed that I might be overgeneralizing the point a bit, I'll keep an eye on that.

I am reminded that saying "X is wrong" to an adult with a belief is ineffective in many circumstances, most notably the circumstance were the belief is a preconception, based in emotion or more specifically an irrational belief. Is this not one consequence of bias? That a person, in some cases/topics, won't update their beliefs and indeed strengthen their belief in the counterargument against the updating. Presumably you've read http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ Which alludes to how knowledge of bias can be used dismissively, i.e. an irrational use of a rationale.

"Why logical argument has never been successful at changing prejudices, beliefs, emotions or perceptions. Why these things can be changed only through perception." De Bono, "I am right, you are wrong". De Bono discusses this extensively.

If the belief is rational, and perhaps that's one component of what you consider a "competent adult", the adult could be more open to updating the fact/knowledge - yet even this situation has a wealth of counter examples, such that there is a term for it - belief perseverance.

In my experience unsolicited advice is rarely accepted regardless of its utility and veracity. Perhaps I communicate with many closed minds, or perhaps I am merely experiencing the availability heuristic in context of our discussion.

Thanks for the post on negativity Vaniver. I wouldn't go bungee jumping if it had a 5% failure rate.

Mostly in discouraging behavior...

That viewpoint can be considered as based upon Skinners model of Behaviourism, it's been shown to be less effective for learning than being positive.

Makes sense - we tend to remember what we are emotionally engaged in and what is reinforced. When the negativity is associated with the 5%, what is reinforced is that a person is "wrong", that's associated with feelings of low self efficacy and tends to discourage (most) people from the topic. When that happens they regress - not progress, they tend to get even more wrong next time as they've not stayed engaged in the topic.

...As well, an important rationality skill is updating on valuable information from sources you dislike; dealing with negativity in safer circumstances may help people learn to better deal with negativity in less safe circumstances.

I agree that an important skill is to update ones information, however the discouragement that is provoked by negativity isn't efficient in evoking updating. Confident people update their information, people who aren't attacked have no need to defend and so they remain open, openess is the key attitude for updating information. Negativity destroys and/or minimizes confidence which contributes to closing a mind.

What negativity does, in context of learning, is to encourage secrecy, resentment, avoidance and close mindedness. Again this stuff is all known as a consequence of punishment, which is what negativity - as discouraging behaviour is associated with.

Apparently a more effective way forward is to model the behaviour that one wants to encourage and ignore the behaviour one wants to discourage - extinction.

thomblake, consider a high distinction as an A+ grade. Perhaps as along the lines of Newtonian Mechanics. It's mostly right.

Sure, if you're running in debate mode and thinking in terms of 'sides' or 'us versus them' and trying to 'win', then that might be something to do. Solution: don't do that in the first place.

Indeed, a valuable point. So what's up with the score keeping system of LW then. It encourages thinking in terms of sides and competition. -1, not my side, +1 my side. -1 lost, +1 won.

Don't worry, everything you believe is almost certainly wrong - don't expect to find yourself in the 95% correct state any time soon. We're running on corrupted hardware in the first place, and nowhere near the end of science. We can reduce hardly any of our high-level concepts to their physical working parts.

lol. Fair enough. I would place the 95% not on some unknown scale of what is absolutely true - that science doesn't yet know, but instead on the relative scale of what science currently knows. Does that make a difference to your point?

First, fix those too.

Yep, tough to become self less, yet still place enough value upon oneself to not be a door mat. Rudyard Kiplings "If" shows a pathway.

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you. If all men count with you, but none too much. http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

Eastern philosophy also has approaches - that are a thousand years ahead of western science.

Vaniver. Mate. I accept that you believe

It seeks to minimize arrogance and maximize doubt.

but I dispute that it achieves those. I believe instead that it maximises arrogance and maximises doubt in the others point of view, and in maximising doubt in the other persons view we minimize our doubt in our own view.

The belief that it's difficult to be completely right, encourages people to look for that gap that is "wrong" and then drive a wedge into it and expand it until it's all that's being talked about.

If 95% is correct and 5% is wrong, criticising the 5% is a means to hurting the person - they have after all gotten 95% correct. It's not rational to discount peoples feelings by focusing upon their error and ignoring their correctness. It's destructive, it breaks people. Sure some few thrive on that kind of struggle - most don't, again this is proven stuff. And I'm not going to post 10 freeking sources on that - all that's doing for me is wasting my time and providing more opportunity for others to confirm their bias by fighting against it. If someone wants to find that information it's out there.

When you (or anyone else) got a high distinction for a unit or assignment or exam, was that a moment to go, fuck - didn't remember that a pre ganglionic fibre doesn't look anything like a post gangleoic nerve (aka ds9), or was it a moment to leap for joy and go, you little ripper I got 95%!

I agree negativity has its uses, often it's about "piss off" and go away, leave me alone; sometimes that's useful, but you'll note that those fall on the arrogant side of emotions - that of self. (this will get a wedge driven in it too, heck I could drive one in, but it remains somewhat true).

Vaniver, I'd consider it a positive discussion to talk about negativity. Would you mind explaining to me where "negativity has its uses".

And to show that I consider the

It seeks to minimize arrogance and maximize doubt.

viewpoint.

Yeh, ok I get that, when we apply the concept to ourselves then we are minimizing our arrogance and maximizing our doubt. And that'll work. We'll second guess ourselves, we'll edit our posts, and re edit, and check our dictionaries and quote our sources and these are all useful things. They keep us honest. But what about when we apply those concepts to others - as is our tendency due to the self serving bias and the group serving bias?

thanks for the link paper-machine, that's quite a reasonable policy.

If I wasn't downvoted to such a degree that I have no opportunity to downvote, I might consider implementing it. I'll certainly use the concept to more thoroughly mitigate my annoyance about those unable to follow argument.

I'll up vote you in accordance with my policy. Which is that if a person says a single useful thing, regardless of the rest of their post, I'll give it a +1.

My reasoning for this policy is twofold. I reject the negativity that is encouraged by criticism and it's aim of proving or showing that some one is wrong, rather than proving oneself right. I accept that when one focuses upon the positive, or worthwhile components of someone's beliefs/actions/arguments one creates a valuable synergy that encourages a pathway towards truth and understanding.

Sometimes I don't implement my own policy, but hey, it's all a work in progress.

On reflection the sites name "lesswrong" really should have set off an alarm bell. I'm not interested particularly in being lesswrong. I am interested in being moreright.

Positive psychology and educational psychology have shown that positivity contributes more readily to learning than negativity.

Being rational is a component of religion, though the hard core atheist rejects that fact.

I once lightly unpacked the story of genesis and related it to more modern theories of cosmology and biology. Considering the resources available to the author of Genesis, it turns out to be quite effective. Sure it's way off, don't get me wrong, but how many thousand years ago was it written, how'd they work it out? Thousands of years ago, and some of it is still congruent with modern science.

I'll provide a link in a pm if you request.