I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don’t feel too distinct to me. Early in one’s intellectual development it might make sense to just “shop around” for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren’t on the collective map.
The casus belli example Habryka gives in the “Correctness as defence against the dark arts” strikes me as an example of … how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did not just read some old rationalist blog post called “Casus belli, how people use it to manipulate each other, and how to avoid getting got”, but that he formed this connection himself.) More generally but also personally, I feel like several times in my life (including now) I have been in bad situations where the world just does not seem to have a solution to my problem, where no amount of google-fu, reading books, seeking societally-established forms of help (therapists, doctors, etc.) has helped. The only way out seems to be to do original thinking.
I also want to highlight that the mental motions of Correctness reasoning seems to be susceptible to the dark arts (to be clear, I think Habryka himself is smart enough to avoid this kind of thing, but I want to highlight this for others). I feel this most whenever I go on Twitter. Like, I go on there thinking “ok, for whatever reason many people (even Wei Dai now, apparently) are discoursing on here now, so I better read it to not fall behind, I better enlarge my hypothesis space by taking in new ideas and increase the range of thoughts I can think!” (this is the kind of thing I mean by “mental motions of Correctness reasoning”—I am mainly motivated by making my map bigger, not making it more detailed). But then after a while I feel like the social environment is tugging me to feel a certain way, value certain things, believe certain things (or else I’m a bad person) (maybe I only had this line of thought because Qiaochu tugged me in a certain direction!). I started out wanting to just explore and try to make my map Correct, but turns out the territory contained adversarial computations… This sort of thing, it seems to me, is even worse for the non-LessWrong population. Again it seems to me most healthy to mostly just be thinking for myself and then periodically check in on Twitter discourse to see what’s up (this is aspirational).
I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don’t feel too distinct to me. Early in one’s intellectual development it might make sense to just “shop around” for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren’t on the collective map.
The casus belli example Habryka gives in the “Correctness as defence against the dark arts” strikes me as an example of … how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did not just read some old rationalist blog post called “Casus belli, how people use it to manipulate each other, and how to avoid getting got”, but that he formed this connection himself.) More generally but also personally, I feel like several times in my life (including now) I have been in bad situations where the world just does not seem to have a solution to my problem, where no amount of google-fu, reading books, seeking societally-established forms of help (therapists, doctors, etc.) has helped. The only way out seems to be to do original thinking.
I also want to highlight that the mental motions of Correctness reasoning seems to be susceptible to the dark arts (to be clear, I think Habryka himself is smart enough to avoid this kind of thing, but I want to highlight this for others). I feel this most whenever I go on Twitter. Like, I go on there thinking “ok, for whatever reason many people (even Wei Dai now, apparently) are discoursing on here now, so I better read it to not fall behind, I better enlarge my hypothesis space by taking in new ideas and increase the range of thoughts I can think!” (this is the kind of thing I mean by “mental motions of Correctness reasoning”—I am mainly motivated by making my map bigger, not making it more detailed). But then after a while I feel like the social environment is tugging me to feel a certain way, value certain things, believe certain things (or else I’m a bad person) (maybe I only had this line of thought because Qiaochu tugged me in a certain direction!). I started out wanting to just explore and try to make my map Correct, but turns out the territory contained adversarial computations… This sort of thing, it seems to me, is even worse for the non-LessWrong population. Again it seems to me most healthy to mostly just be thinking for myself and then periodically check in on Twitter discourse to see what’s up (this is aspirational).