the sort of bad advice people love (follow your feelings, stop trying to think; our Enemies are Pure Evil).
The only thing that makes these bad advice is context. In the context of activities requiring fast action, following your feelings and not thinking may be excellent advice, for example.
A basketball player finding the shortest path through the opposition to the net will probably epic fail if s/he does not follow his/her feelings, or tries to think. IIRC, even the renowned Bayesian basketball player (who uses an extremely probability-driven strategy) has trained himself so that his intuitive response is to go where the probabilties say to go, rather than actually doing the probability calculations in his head during play.
Most likely it was one of the one or two people who systematically downvote a large number of comments. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s at least one user who appears to periodically downvote all my comments, ever since I first ended up on the top 10 contributors list.
It’s kind of weird to watch, because my karma will drop by dozens of points in an hour, and I can see which comments were voted down. Then, most of the comments that are on active posts get slowly voted back up above zero. Then, sometimes the second downvoter comes through and knocks the marginal comments back to zero or negative. Depending on how old the comments are when the second wave hits, they may get “left behind” and not re-upvoted by readers.
The silly thing about all this is that the downvoters are simply teaching me to ignore any negative scores on my comments, especially if the comments fall just outside the trailing upvote window created by post activity.
“A basketball player finding the shortest path through the opposition to the net will probably epic fail if s/he does not follow his/her feelings, or tries to think. ”
Well, yes, I wouldn’t want to rule out the efficacy of unconscious calculations; trying to use vectors to calculate how to catch a frisbee is likely to be unsucessful. Conscious rationcination is resource intensive and slow.
Where is is bad advice is when people use these processes as a substitute for rationcination; forming of abstract theories on the basis of emotional pleasantness is unlikely to render accurate beliefs. Of course, accuracy isn’t everything.
The only thing that makes these bad advice is context. In the context of activities requiring fast action, following your feelings and not thinking may be excellent advice, for example.
A basketball player finding the shortest path through the opposition to the net will probably epic fail if s/he does not follow his/her feelings, or tries to think. IIRC, even the renowned Bayesian basketball player (who uses an extremely probability-driven strategy) has trained himself so that his intuitive response is to go where the probabilties say to go, rather than actually doing the probability calculations in his head during play.
I’d like to know why this has been voted down.
Most likely it was one of the one or two people who systematically downvote a large number of comments. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s at least one user who appears to periodically downvote all my comments, ever since I first ended up on the top 10 contributors list.
It’s kind of weird to watch, because my karma will drop by dozens of points in an hour, and I can see which comments were voted down. Then, most of the comments that are on active posts get slowly voted back up above zero. Then, sometimes the second downvoter comes through and knocks the marginal comments back to zero or negative. Depending on how old the comments are when the second wave hits, they may get “left behind” and not re-upvoted by readers.
The silly thing about all this is that the downvoters are simply teaching me to ignore any negative scores on my comments, especially if the comments fall just outside the trailing upvote window created by post activity.
“A basketball player finding the shortest path through the opposition to the net will probably epic fail if s/he does not follow his/her feelings, or tries to think. ” Well, yes, I wouldn’t want to rule out the efficacy of unconscious calculations; trying to use vectors to calculate how to catch a frisbee is likely to be unsucessful. Conscious rationcination is resource intensive and slow.
Where is is bad advice is when people use these processes as a substitute for rationcination; forming of abstract theories on the basis of emotional pleasantness is unlikely to render accurate beliefs. Of course, accuracy isn’t everything.