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 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 wa...
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... (read more)