I tend to lose interest after encountering something like “Our current theories of the physical world don’t work, and can never be made to work until they account for life and consciousness.” (The writer is mentally classified as a hopeless case, so no fun to be had.) This is probably a defensive mechanism developed after 5 years in a physics IRC channel.
Yet I still get frustrated when an apparently elementary error is committed by a person who should know better (especially if, after some careful analysis, this person turns out to be me).
And it amuses me when rationalists get frustrated at the elementary errors, and mistakenly think that they “should know better”, despite the overwhelming evidence that they don’t. It especially amuses me when that rationalist is me. I should know better, and I do upon reflection, but rarely do in the moment.
I calm myself with the idea that if I don’t know how to be more intelligent, it isn’t reasonable for me to expect people who are less intelligent than I am to know how to be more intelligent.
I tend to lose interest after encountering something like “Our current theories of the physical world don’t work, and can never be made to work until they account for life and consciousness.” (The writer is mentally classified as a hopeless case, so no fun to be had.) This is probably a defensive mechanism developed after 5 years in a physics IRC channel.
Yet I still get frustrated when an apparently elementary error is committed by a person who should know better (especially if, after some careful analysis, this person turns out to be me).
And it amuses me when rationalists get frustrated at the elementary errors, and mistakenly think that they “should know better”, despite the overwhelming evidence that they don’t. It especially amuses me when that rationalist is me. I should know better, and I do upon reflection, but rarely do in the moment.
I calm myself with the idea that if I don’t know how to be more intelligent, it isn’t reasonable for me to expect people who are less intelligent than I am to know how to be more intelligent.
It seems our brains really are built to assume short inferential distances.