Once again interesting post, but it doesn’t apply to my personal case. I’ve access to no statistics on the issue so I can’t claim how exceptional I am, but my own parents are “more rational than average” (they are atheist maths teachers), and I don’t think they are insane. Or not more than anyone else, at least.
I did realize that my parents were not perfect, and that if I could trust them in loving me and caring for me and wanting the best for me, I couldn’t blindly trust anything they would say. But that didn’t require, for me, such a massive emotional break.
Maybe you’ll tell I’m not “unusually rational”… but at least, I’m trying to better myself, or I wouldn’t spend hours reading LW ;)
Before reading LW, I was not really doubting Science, but neither was I considering it to be an utter sacrilege to claim it was flawed (or that it could be superseded by something better). I knew Bayes’ Theorem, without realizing it was much more important than just understanding a mammography result (which was the way I was using it). That’s a shortcoming of my part, sure.
I can say that even before reading LW, I had a gut feeling that the Cophenaguen interpretation was just… not right. I was in doubt, torn between that gut feeling, and my own humility saying “well, you’re not a physicists, how can you be more right than they are ?” MWI seems much cleaner to me (even if there are a few things that still bother me), but that gut feeling drove me into reading more about QM and rationality. That, and having something to protect.
Well, that’s just my own personal experience, hoping it can help understand things better, but not claiming any generalization from it.
Hi,
Once again interesting post, but it doesn’t apply to my personal case. I’ve access to no statistics on the issue so I can’t claim how exceptional I am, but my own parents are “more rational than average” (they are atheist maths teachers), and I don’t think they are insane. Or not more than anyone else, at least.
I did realize that my parents were not perfect, and that if I could trust them in loving me and caring for me and wanting the best for me, I couldn’t blindly trust anything they would say. But that didn’t require, for me, such a massive emotional break.
Maybe you’ll tell I’m not “unusually rational”… but at least, I’m trying to better myself, or I wouldn’t spend hours reading LW ;)
Before reading LW, I was not really doubting Science, but neither was I considering it to be an utter sacrilege to claim it was flawed (or that it could be superseded by something better). I knew Bayes’ Theorem, without realizing it was much more important than just understanding a mammography result (which was the way I was using it). That’s a shortcoming of my part, sure.
I can say that even before reading LW, I had a gut feeling that the Cophenaguen interpretation was just… not right. I was in doubt, torn between that gut feeling, and my own humility saying “well, you’re not a physicists, how can you be more right than they are ?” MWI seems much cleaner to me (even if there are a few things that still bother me), but that gut feeling drove me into reading more about QM and rationality. That, and having something to protect.
Well, that’s just my own personal experience, hoping it can help understand things better, but not claiming any generalization from it.