The attitude described in that quotation from C S Lewis seems to me (and, I’d guess, to a large majority of LW regulars) very, very, very broken. And perhaps entirely incoherent: how can you accept some things and reject others, while simultaneously not wasting time thinking about what you reject and accepting humbly and uncommentingly what you accept? If you can do that at all, it seems to me that it would have to be by (1) thinking about what you’re hearing, (2) throwing away all the products of that thought other than a binary “accept/reject” distinction, (3) accepting or rejecting, and (4) forgetting about the thinking you did in step 1. Ouch.
There are two ways I can make sense of that quote: first, by assuming that Lewis’s “that which is false or unhelpful” has already been excluded by the time it reaches you, allowing you to turn your critical (by a conventional definition) faculties off and absorb a known-good set of data; and second, by shifting the burden of evaluation entirely to intuition and consciously accepting (humbly and uncommentatingly) only what feels intuitively sound. Neither seems suitable for what we’re doing here; quite aside from any philosophical objections, we don’t have a known-good set that’s good enough to propagate without caveats, and the kind of knowledge we work with is very frequently counterintuitive.
The attitude described in that quotation from C S Lewis seems to me (and, I’d guess, to a large majority of LW regulars) very, very, very broken. And perhaps entirely incoherent: how can you accept some things and reject others, while simultaneously not wasting time thinking about what you reject and accepting humbly and uncommentingly what you accept? If you can do that at all, it seems to me that it would have to be by (1) thinking about what you’re hearing, (2) throwing away all the products of that thought other than a binary “accept/reject” distinction, (3) accepting or rejecting, and (4) forgetting about the thinking you did in step 1. Ouch.
There are two ways I can make sense of that quote: first, by assuming that Lewis’s “that which is false or unhelpful” has already been excluded by the time it reaches you, allowing you to turn your critical (by a conventional definition) faculties off and absorb a known-good set of data; and second, by shifting the burden of evaluation entirely to intuition and consciously accepting (humbly and uncommentatingly) only what feels intuitively sound. Neither seems suitable for what we’re doing here; quite aside from any philosophical objections, we don’t have a known-good set that’s good enough to propagate without caveats, and the kind of knowledge we work with is very frequently counterintuitive.
Following that advice led me to reject that advice. Now THAT’s efficient. CS Lewis was clearly a master of rationality.