I agree with the post; and I think it would be more applicable to us here on LW if we extend it to cover “stupid” as well as “evil”. We see “stupid” and “evil” as not being very different; and we get the same shot of righteous adrenaline from putting down a stupid comment as from putting down an evildoer.
People who work with Steve Jobs said in the 1990s that he assigned everyone a “bozo bit”; and if they disagreed with him a few times, he set their bozo bit to 1, and ignored or derided everything they said from that day onward. That’s functionally very similar to deciding someone is evil. Someone may be more likely to be stupid than to be evil; but that doesn’t make having an irrational and emotional response to it any better.
Nor are we very good at determining who is stupid and who isn’t! I’ve had many, many disagreements with Eliezer and with Vladimir Nesov. I know neither of them are stupid. But too many of us “solve” these recurring disagreements by setting a bozo bit and ignoring that person in the future.
It’s a good general heuristic. It saves time and effort. When a person changes, you might get exposed to overwhelming evidence of such change, and update back only then. It also helps to have topic-specific bozo bits. For me, you are flagged for metaethics and decision theory, but you write good posts on human rationality.
I agree with the post; and I think it would be more applicable to us here on LW if we extend it to cover “stupid” as well as “evil”. We see “stupid” and “evil” as not being very different; and we get the same shot of righteous adrenaline from putting down a stupid comment as from putting down an evildoer.
People who work with Steve Jobs said in the 1990s that he assigned everyone a “bozo bit”; and if they disagreed with him a few times, he set their bozo bit to 1, and ignored or derided everything they said from that day onward. That’s functionally very similar to deciding someone is evil. Someone may be more likely to be stupid than to be evil; but that doesn’t make having an irrational and emotional response to it any better.
Nor are we very good at determining who is stupid and who isn’t! I’ve had many, many disagreements with Eliezer and with Vladimir Nesov. I know neither of them are stupid. But too many of us “solve” these recurring disagreements by setting a bozo bit and ignoring that person in the future.
It’s a good general heuristic. It saves time and effort. When a person changes, you might get exposed to overwhelming evidence of such change, and update back only then. It also helps to have topic-specific bozo bits. For me, you are flagged for metaethics and decision theory, but you write good posts on human rationality.