People have an irrational tendency to simplify their assessment of things into how good or bad they are without considering that the things in question may have many distinct and unrelated attributes.
(alternate summary:)
In non-binary answer spaces, you can't add up pro and con arguments along one dimension without risk of getting important factual questions wrong.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Burch's Law, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Maybe instead of a notebook, Lady Justice could have a middle plate where all facts orthogonal to the question at hand get placed. Or maybe I'm not getting the intended metaphor.
Today's post, The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality, was originally published on 13 March 2007. Two summaries (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Burch's Law, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.