I am not a frequent poster on lesswrong. I’ve been part of the rationality community for a few years now, but I’ve fallen victim to the classic lurker mentality of looking at the most upvoted posts and believing that in comparison to them I haven’t got much to say. This...
I seem to strongly recall that one of Yudkowsky’s essays mentioned a study in which people were told to complete tasks that required complex thinking about shapes and positions while in an MRI machine, and their visual cortex lit up. I listen to a podcast called Hello Internet and the...
This mentality is a good one. It's perhaps the high-level thing that used to guide me towards the behavior I'm looking to emulate but that I forgot to actively keep in my mind. A focus on understanding why people believe what they believe and a willingness to change my own mind may well have been the underlying positive trait that I have not been emulating in my present conversations. I will try to focus on this virtue and see if that improves things. Thank you.
I am not a frequent poster on lesswrong. I’ve been part of the rationality community for a few years now, but I’ve fallen victim to the classic lurker mentality of looking at the most upvoted posts and believing that in comparison to them I haven’t got much to say. This post is, in part, an excuse to start posting anything at all- and in equal parts, an excuse to think about a problem that has been on my mind but not adequately articulated or considered.
I do not believe (or I at least do not behave like someone who believes) that people can change their minds- or, to me more accurate, that I... (read 1551 more words →)
I doubt a few minutes of pondering will provoke any significantly insightful thoughts, but on the off chance that they do here's what I've got:
A major pitfall of most tests is that they can end up examining a wide variety of confounding variables. For example if the test for rationality is based on a written prompt then it selects against those with dyslexia in spite of their rationality. If it's based on a spoken prompt then it selects for those with similar accents to the test-giver, or against those who had it read to them in a strange way. Ideally since the thing that we're selecting for is (I assume) practical reasoning... (read more)
I seem to strongly recall that one of Yudkowsky’s essays mentioned a study in which people were told to complete tasks that required complex thinking about shapes and positions while in an MRI machine, and their visual cortex lit up. I listen to a podcast called Hello Internet and the good folks there are asking if there are any studies regarding how people visualize at a neurological level. Could someone link the original essay, or simply the scientific study in question?
Thank you for the wonderfully detailed reply :)
It's certainly worth considering that the internet may have a greater volume of content produced by crazy people. That doesn't ease my worries about a world full of people who are at least crazy at some low level sufficient to make them wrong about quite major stuff, but it does at least put my 'people are wrong on the internet?!' worries in better context.
If age alone is a heuristic of sanity, then things are looking quite bad because I think I'm one of the younger people who actively chats on the discord. But in general, I see what you mean and people are liable to... (read more)