It seems to me that uneducated-person opinion would be the “human-intuitive position”, and the educated person opinion would be… changed off from that, with a tendency to be somewhere in the direction of truth.
Although the uneducated-person opinion won’t always be constant across different times and cultures (although it varies; Death is Bad is probably a universal for 5-year-olds, Racism might be pretty universal outside of isolated groups with populations too small to have any racial diversity), so I don’t think it will usually be an inherent position.
I think steven0461′s statement makes some sense though if you talk about the average position among many different issues, and also if you only look at issues where things like evidence and human reasoning can tell you about the truth. I expect that the uneducated opinion will appear distributed randomly around the truth (although not absurdly far from it, when you consider the entirety of possibility-space), and the educated opinion will diverge from it in a way that will usually be towards what the evidence supports, but often overshooting, undershooting, or going far to the side. Likewise the 3rd-stage opinion should diverge from the educated opinion in a similar manner, except… by definition it will be in the rough direction of the original position, or we’d just call it a more radical version of the educated position.
However there seems to be a MAJOR potential pitfall in reasoning about where they’re located, since all the examples listed tend to align politically (roughly conservative/liberal/LessWrong-type). So trying to reason by looking at those examples and seeing which one is true, and then trying to derive a theory on the tendencies involved based on that, will tend to give you a theory which supports your position being right.
It seems to me that uneducated-person opinion would be the “human-intuitive position”, and the educated person opinion would be… changed off from that, with a tendency to be somewhere in the direction of truth. Although the uneducated-person opinion won’t always be constant across different times and cultures (although it varies; Death is Bad is probably a universal for 5-year-olds, Racism might be pretty universal outside of isolated groups with populations too small to have any racial diversity), so I don’t think it will usually be an inherent position.
I think steven0461′s statement makes some sense though if you talk about the average position among many different issues, and also if you only look at issues where things like evidence and human reasoning can tell you about the truth. I expect that the uneducated opinion will appear distributed randomly around the truth (although not absurdly far from it, when you consider the entirety of possibility-space), and the educated opinion will diverge from it in a way that will usually be towards what the evidence supports, but often overshooting, undershooting, or going far to the side. Likewise the 3rd-stage opinion should diverge from the educated opinion in a similar manner, except… by definition it will be in the rough direction of the original position, or we’d just call it a more radical version of the educated position.
However there seems to be a MAJOR potential pitfall in reasoning about where they’re located, since all the examples listed tend to align politically (roughly conservative/liberal/LessWrong-type). So trying to reason by looking at those examples and seeing which one is true, and then trying to derive a theory on the tendencies involved based on that, will tend to give you a theory which supports your position being right.