Most people are binary about beliefs. Either they believe X is true or they believe X is false. When talking with LW people you find people saying: “I think X is likely but I don’t think it’s certain”.
If your goal is to get to the right shade of gray, then you need to change your beliefs a lot.
It’s likely easier to convince me that P(X)~0.10 instead of P(X)~0.001 while at the same time it’s harder to convince me to go from P(X)~0.90 to P(X)~0.999
This seems like a decent explanation of why I change my own mind as frequently as I do. If you’re just tracking my history of Internet comments, I probably sound all over the place, but it’s really me going from 54% certain of position X to 52% certain of not X, and it’s hard to properly express that in an environment prone to rhetorical flourish and a debate atmosphere where you feel like you really really can’t back down or you’ll look weak. Most of the interesting things out there are very hard to legitimately be certain of. Factor in availability bias and it’s easy to find yourself arguing for something you’re really on the fence about just because you read a good argument for it a few hours ago (but not really any better than the argument for the opposite position a few days ago), then you make a good argument because you’re good at arguing, and you just convinced yourself without actually introducing any new evidence.
And now I’m trapped in an infinite meta-regress wondering if I actually believe what I just wrote or it just sounds plausible.
Most people are binary about beliefs. Either they believe X is true or they believe X is false. When talking with LW people you find people saying: “I think X is likely but I don’t think it’s certain”.
If your goal is to get to the right shade of gray, then you need to change your beliefs a lot.
It’s likely easier to convince me that P(X)~0.10 instead of P(X)~0.001 while at the same time it’s harder to convince me to go from P(X)~0.90 to P(X)~0.999
This seems like a decent explanation of why I change my own mind as frequently as I do. If you’re just tracking my history of Internet comments, I probably sound all over the place, but it’s really me going from 54% certain of position X to 52% certain of not X, and it’s hard to properly express that in an environment prone to rhetorical flourish and a debate atmosphere where you feel like you really really can’t back down or you’ll look weak. Most of the interesting things out there are very hard to legitimately be certain of. Factor in availability bias and it’s easy to find yourself arguing for something you’re really on the fence about just because you read a good argument for it a few hours ago (but not really any better than the argument for the opposite position a few days ago), then you make a good argument because you’re good at arguing, and you just convinced yourself without actually introducing any new evidence.
And now I’m trapped in an infinite meta-regress wondering if I actually believe what I just wrote or it just sounds plausible.