I’m not sure why this post is getting downvoted. I found it interesting and easy to read. Thanks for writing!
Mostly I find myself agreeing with what you wrote. I’ll give an example of one point where I found it interesting to zoom in on some of the details.
It’s easy to see how in a real conversation, two people could appear to be disagreeing over whether Johnson is a great actor even though in reality they aren’t disagreeing at all. Instead, they are merely using different conceptions of what it is to be a “great actor”
I think this kind of disagreement can, to some degree, also be a ‘fight’ about the idea of “great actor” itself, as silly as that might sound. I guess I might put it as: beside the more ‘object-level’ things “great actor” might mean, the gestalt of “great actor” has an additional meaning of its own. Perhaps it implies that one’s particular taste/interpretation is the more universal/‘correct’ one. Perhaps compressing one’s opinions into the concept of “great actor” creates a halo effect, which feels and is cognitively processed differently than the mere facts of the opinions themselves.
This particular interpretation is more vague/nebulous than your post, though (which I enjoyed for explaining the ‘basic’/fundamental ideas of reasoning in a very solid and easy to understand way).
I’m also confused about the degree of downvotes. (It’s not really new content for LessWrong but I’m happy to see more rationality content on the margin, even if it’s re-covering the basics)
(I do think opening with “you have ‘zero’ chance of being intellectually wise without this” is some combination of “not necessarily true” and “sure sounds like you need to have resolved the ambiguity of what counts as intellectually wise to be sure of that”, and wish that line was different)
I downvoted it for the first paragraph alone. The rest gave me no reason to change my mind, and only barely enough reason not to give it a strong downvote.
I’m not sure why this post is getting downvoted. I found it interesting and easy to read. Thanks for writing!
Mostly I find myself agreeing with what you wrote. I’ll give an example of one point where I found it interesting to zoom in on some of the details.
I think this kind of disagreement can, to some degree, also be a ‘fight’ about the idea of “great actor” itself, as silly as that might sound. I guess I might put it as: beside the more ‘object-level’ things “great actor” might mean, the gestalt of “great actor” has an additional meaning of its own. Perhaps it implies that one’s particular taste/interpretation is the more universal/‘correct’ one. Perhaps compressing one’s opinions into the concept of “great actor” creates a halo effect, which feels and is cognitively processed differently than the mere facts of the opinions themselves.
This particular interpretation is more vague/nebulous than your post, though (which I enjoyed for explaining the ‘basic’/fundamental ideas of reasoning in a very solid and easy to understand way).
I’m also confused about the degree of downvotes. (It’s not really new content for LessWrong but I’m happy to see more rationality content on the margin, even if it’s re-covering the basics)
(I do think opening with “you have ‘zero’ chance of being intellectually wise without this” is some combination of “not necessarily true” and “sure sounds like you need to have resolved the ambiguity of what counts as intellectually wise to be sure of that”, and wish that line was different)
I downvoted it for the first paragraph alone. The rest gave me no reason to change my mind, and only barely enough reason not to give it a strong downvote.
fair’nuff