This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t hold up that well under mindkilling conditions: i.e. any condition where you have a stronger, more concrete loyalty to some other chunk of your identity than being the kind of person who changes your mind, and you perceive that other identity to be threatened.
It also doesn’t apply when you’re blocked from even perceiving someone’s arguments, because your brain has already cached a conclusion as being so obvious that only an evil or lunatic person could think something so stupid. Under such a condition, the idea that there is even something to change your mind about will not occur to you: the other person will just seem to be irredeemably wrong, and instead of feeling cognitive dissonance at trying to rationalize, you will feel like you are just patiently trying to explain common sense to a lunatic or a troll.
IOW, everyone in this thread who’s using their own experience (inside view) as a guide to how rational rationalists are, is erring in not using the available outside-view evidence of how rational rationalists aren’t: your own experience doesn’t include the times where you didn’t notice you were being closed-minded, and thus your estimates will be way off.
This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t hold up that well under mindkilling conditions: i.e. any condition where you have a stronger, more concrete loyalty to some other chunk of your identity than being the kind of person who changes your mind, and you perceive that other identity to be threatened.
It also doesn’t apply when you’re blocked from even perceiving someone’s arguments, because your brain has already cached a conclusion as being so obvious that only an evil or lunatic person could think something so stupid. Under such a condition, the idea that there is even something to change your mind about will not occur to you: the other person will just seem to be irredeemably wrong, and instead of feeling cognitive dissonance at trying to rationalize, you will feel like you are just patiently trying to explain common sense to a lunatic or a troll.
IOW, everyone in this thread who’s using their own experience (inside view) as a guide to how rational rationalists are, is erring in not using the available outside-view evidence of how rational rationalists aren’t: your own experience doesn’t include the times where you didn’t notice you were being closed-minded, and thus your estimates will be way off.