Conclusions from this article:
a) you are never safe
b) you must understand a) on a emotional basis
c) the only way to achieve b) is through an experience of failure after following the rules you trusted
The flaw is that the article actually does the opposite of what it wants to accomplish: by giving the warning(a) it makes people feel safer. In order to convey the necessary emotion of “not feeling safe”(b) Eliezer had to make the PS regarding the flaw.
In a certain sense this also negates c). I think Eliezer doesn’t really want us to fail(c) in order to recognize a), the whole point of overcomingbias.com is to prevent humans from failing. So if Eliezer did a good job in conveying the necessary insecurity through his PS then hopefully c) won’t happen to you.
That second paragraph was hard for me. Seeing “a)” and “b)” repeated made me parse it as a jigsaw puzzle where the second “a)” was a subpoint of the first “b)”, but then “c)” got back to the main sequence only to jump back to the “b)”, the second subpoint of the first “b)”. That didn’t make any sense, so I tried to read each clause separately, and came up with “1. You are never safe. 2. You must understand. 3. On an emotional basis...” before becoming utterly lost. Only after coming back to it later did I get that repeated letters were references to previous letters.
One suggestion for the flaw:
Conclusions from this article: a) you are never safe b) you must understand a) on a emotional basis c) the only way to achieve b) is through an experience of failure after following the rules you trusted
The flaw is that the article actually does the opposite of what it wants to accomplish: by giving the warning(a) it makes people feel safer. In order to convey the necessary emotion of “not feeling safe”(b) Eliezer had to make the PS regarding the flaw.
In a certain sense this also negates c). I think Eliezer doesn’t really want us to fail(c) in order to recognize a), the whole point of overcomingbias.com is to prevent humans from failing. So if Eliezer did a good job in conveying the necessary insecurity through his PS then hopefully c) won’t happen to you.
Roland
That second paragraph was hard for me. Seeing “a)” and “b)” repeated made me parse it as a jigsaw puzzle where the second “a)” was a subpoint of the first “b)”, but then “c)” got back to the main sequence only to jump back to the “b)”, the second subpoint of the first “b)”. That didn’t make any sense, so I tried to read each clause separately, and came up with “1. You are never safe. 2. You must understand. 3. On an emotional basis...” before becoming utterly lost. Only after coming back to it later did I get that repeated letters were references to previous letters.