Convince everyone that there exist people who are radically different from them, or something. I’m so fed up with not being believed when I explain how I’m different.
I’d note that there is a big difference between deeply believing that other people are radically different from me, versus believing people when they tell me how specifically they’re different. The former was hammered into me by experience from a pretty age—my mind is a pretty-obviously-poor-model of other peoples’ minds, so I definitely expect on a gut level that other people are radically different from me.
But most people are pretty delusional about themselves in general, and the ways-in-which-they-are-unusual are included in that. We have more evidence than others about our own peculiarities, but also much more severe biases in perceiving our own peculiarities. So if someone tells me that they’re unusual in some particular way, that’s not necessarily strong evidence. It mostly depends on priors about how common it is for people to think they’re unusual in that way, and how much that correlates with the actual trait.
I agree that it’s not necessarily strong evidence, but it should in most cases focus your attention pretty heavily on a narrow subset of [hypotheses which would tend to produce that claim], one of which is usually [that claim being true].
You probably already agree with that, but I wanted to spell it out.
I’d note that there is a big difference between deeply believing that other people are radically different from me, versus believing people when they tell me how specifically they’re different. The former was hammered into me by experience from a pretty age—my mind is a pretty-obviously-poor-model of other peoples’ minds, so I definitely expect on a gut level that other people are radically different from me.
But most people are pretty delusional about themselves in general, and the ways-in-which-they-are-unusual are included in that. We have more evidence than others about our own peculiarities, but also much more severe biases in perceiving our own peculiarities. So if someone tells me that they’re unusual in some particular way, that’s not necessarily strong evidence. It mostly depends on priors about how common it is for people to think they’re unusual in that way, and how much that correlates with the actual trait.
I agree that it’s not necessarily strong evidence, but it should in most cases focus your attention pretty heavily on a narrow subset of [hypotheses which would tend to produce that claim], one of which is usually [that claim being true].
You probably already agree with that, but I wanted to spell it out.
Yeah, it’s a really good example of getting just enough bits to privilege the hypothesis.
I was mostly thinking of situations where someone thinks that if something is not a problem for them, it can’t possibly be a problem for anyone else.
If everyone have an above zero prior on “this other person might be very diffrent from me”, that would be a great improvment.