Discover more from Overcoming Bias
Luke Muehlhauser recently interviewed me as part of his Conversations series. Seeing the lightly edited transcript reminds me of why I usually write instead of posting transcripts. But with a little more cutting, I can find at least one satisfactory quote:
Some people have been brought up in a Popperian paradigm, where there’s a limited scientific method and there’s a limited range of topics it can apply to, and you turn the crank and if it can apply to those topics then you have science and you have truth, and you have something you’ve learned and otherwise everything else is opinion, equally undifferentiated opinion.
I think that’s completely wrong. That is, we have a wide range of intellectual methods, [and] some of those methods work better than others. … But honestly, there are very few topics on which you can’t learn more if you just sit down and work at it. … Of course, just because you can learn about almost anything doesn’t mean you should. It doesn’t mean it’s worth the effort to society or yourself, and it doesn’t mean that there are … easy ways to convince other people that you’ve learned something. … [Also,] it isn’t necessarily well-suited for being an impressiveness display. (more)
If an topic is important enough, just start to study it; if you are smart, then eventually you’ll make progress, and learn important things. Just don’t expect it to be easy to persuade or impress other people with what you’ve learned.
To Learn, Try
Lot easy to persuade or impress other people with what you've learned if you're in the elite (look at elite spouses publishing cookbooks). Normal people who do that just get cut down by the Tall Poppy Syndrome.
Coercive structures have a lot of flaws, especially if it's difficult to exit*. I'm just pointing out that I hadn't absorbed this particular advantage until now.
* In a startup it's relatively easy, but vesting schedules (among other things) try to make it a little harder.