A more knowledgeable person can see holes regardless of who’s right, and so training deferring to what a teacher communicates just because they seem smart and can point out flaws seems wrong.
You smile. You agree. You show genuine interest in the other person. You don’t say “You’re wrong”. You never even say your own beliefs (unless asked). There’s nothing for the person to get angry at because you never attacked them. Instead of criticizing, you point out errors indirectly, via a joke. You cheer them on as they dig their own grave. After all, you’re trying to lose too.
This is something that allows you to persuade people. If you have more background knowledge about something and can say something that’d make the person you’re talking to think you pointed out a flaw/a hole in their understanding of the issue, they might defer to you, thinking you’re smarter and you help. If instead of asking “what do you think? why do you think that?”, and letting the person think on their own, you instead ask questions that communicate your understanding, then I’m not sure this actually improves their thinking or even allows them to arrive to truer beliefs in a systematic way.
If your beliefs are false, they’ll update to your false beliefs; if your models are incomplete, they’ll believe in these incomplete models and won’t start seeing holes in them.
In the second video, you didn’t ask the person where’s the money coming from and where they go and who’s better off and who’s worse off; they didn’t try to draw any schemes and figure this out for themselves. Instead, they listened to you and agreed with what you communicated to them. They didn’t have a thought that if someone builds a cable, they must expect profits to cover the cost, despite someone else possibly trying to build a cable; they didn’t think that the money going into building a cable don’t disappear; they remain in the economy, through wages and costs of everything paid to everyone involved; the actual resources humanity spends on a cable are perhaps some fuel, some amount of material, and human time. Was it unethical to spend these resources that way? What does “unethical” even mean here? Was someone hurt during the construction, did people decide to get a worker’s job instead doing art? What about trading itself- what are the positive and negative externalities, what are the resources spent by humanity as a whole? What is the pot everyone competes for? Are they spending more resources to compete for it than the pot contains, or are they just eating all the free money on the table? Do they provide something valuable to the market, getting this pot in return? (Perhaps liquidity or a lot of slightly more up-to-date information?)
I have no idea how any of this works but to me, it looked like you made your arguments in a persuasive way, but my impression is the conversation you’ve had on the second video didn’t really improve general thinking/rationality skills of the person you were talking to.
The way I look at things, there are multiple steps to learning how to think better. The first step is realizing that your thoughts are an incoherent mess. Then you develop a taste for good reasoning. After that you can learn good thinking skills.
Whereas if you start by trying to learn good thinking skills, then it’s very easy to say things that sound correct but are actually unsound.
I like to start from the beginning, and then take as long as is necessary with each step.
A more knowledgeable person can see holes regardless of who’s right, and so training deferring to what a teacher communicates just because they seem smart and can point out flaws seems wrong.
This is something that allows you to persuade people. If you have more background knowledge about something and can say something that’d make the person you’re talking to think you pointed out a flaw/a hole in their understanding of the issue, they might defer to you, thinking you’re smarter and you help. If instead of asking “what do you think? why do you think that?”, and letting the person think on their own, you instead ask questions that communicate your understanding, then I’m not sure this actually improves their thinking or even allows them to arrive to truer beliefs in a systematic way.
If your beliefs are false, they’ll update to your false beliefs; if your models are incomplete, they’ll believe in these incomplete models and won’t start seeing holes in them.
In the second video, you didn’t ask the person where’s the money coming from and where they go and who’s better off and who’s worse off; they didn’t try to draw any schemes and figure this out for themselves. Instead, they listened to you and agreed with what you communicated to them. They didn’t have a thought that if someone builds a cable, they must expect profits to cover the cost, despite someone else possibly trying to build a cable; they didn’t think that the money going into building a cable don’t disappear; they remain in the economy, through wages and costs of everything paid to everyone involved; the actual resources humanity spends on a cable are perhaps some fuel, some amount of material, and human time. Was it unethical to spend these resources that way? What does “unethical” even mean here? Was someone hurt during the construction, did people decide to get a worker’s job instead doing art? What about trading itself- what are the positive and negative externalities, what are the resources spent by humanity as a whole? What is the pot everyone competes for? Are they spending more resources to compete for it than the pot contains, or are they just eating all the free money on the table? Do they provide something valuable to the market, getting this pot in return? (Perhaps liquidity or a lot of slightly more up-to-date information?)
I have no idea how any of this works but to me, it looked like you made your arguments in a persuasive way, but my impression is the conversation you’ve had on the second video didn’t really improve general thinking/rationality skills of the person you were talking to.
The way I look at things, there are multiple steps to learning how to think better. The first step is realizing that your thoughts are an incoherent mess. Then you develop a taste for good reasoning. After that you can learn good thinking skills.
Whereas if you start by trying to learn good thinking skills, then it’s very easy to say things that sound correct but are actually unsound.
I like to start from the beginning, and then take as long as is necessary with each step.