I think this could be better put as “what do you believe, that most others don’t?”—being wrong is, from the inside, indistinguishable from being right, and a rationalist should know this.
I think you are wrong. Identifying a belief as wrong is not enough to remove it. If someone has low self esteem and you give him an intellectual argument that’s sound and that he wants to believe that’s frequently not enough to change the fundamental belief behind low self esteem.
Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about how asking a schizophrenic for weird beliefs makes the schizophrenic tell the doctor about the faulty beliefs.
If you ask a question differently you get people reacting differently. If you want to get a broad spectrum of answers than it makes sense to ask the question in a bunch of different ways.
I’m intelligent enough to know that my own beliefs about the social status I hold within a group could very well be off even if those beliefs feel very real to me.
If you ask me: “Do you think X is really true and everyone who disagrees is wrong?”, you trigger slightly different heuristics than in me than if you ask “Do you believe X?”.
It’s probably pretty straightforward to demonstrate this and some cognitive psychologist might even already have done the work.
I think you are wrong. Identifying a belief as wrong is not enough to remove it. If someone has low self esteem and you give him an intellectual argument that’s sound and that he wants to believe that’s frequently not enough to change the fundamental belief behind low self esteem.
Scott Alexander wrote a blog post about how asking a schizophrenic for weird beliefs makes the schizophrenic tell the doctor about the faulty beliefs.
If you ask a question differently you get people reacting differently. If you want to get a broad spectrum of answers than it makes sense to ask the question in a bunch of different ways.
I’m intelligent enough to know that my own beliefs about the social status I hold within a group could very well be off even if those beliefs feel very real to me.
If you ask me: “Do you think X is really true and everyone who disagrees is wrong?”, you trigger slightly different heuristics than in me than if you ask “Do you believe X?”.
It’s probably pretty straightforward to demonstrate this and some cognitive psychologist might even already have done the work.