Good point—I changed the title of the document. (I’m letting “the Scary Idea” remain in the topic of this post, so that people can quickly see what this thread is about.)
I think ‘scary idea’ is a very appropriate description. At the same time many would try to hide up the fact that idea is scary, to appear more rational and less rationalizing. The scary stuff does not tend to result in most sensible reasoning—look at war on terror spending vs spending those money on any other form of death prevention.
edit: that is to say, the scary ideas, given our biases when scared, need lower prior for validity of reasoning. People try to get others to assign higher prior to their ideas than would be reasonable, by disguising the mechanism of arrival at the idea.
Good point—I changed the title of the document. (I’m letting “the Scary Idea” remain in the topic of this post, so that people can quickly see what this thread is about.)
I think ‘scary idea’ is a very appropriate description. At the same time many would try to hide up the fact that idea is scary, to appear more rational and less rationalizing. The scary stuff does not tend to result in most sensible reasoning—look at war on terror spending vs spending those money on any other form of death prevention.
edit: that is to say, the scary ideas, given our biases when scared, need lower prior for validity of reasoning. People try to get others to assign higher prior to their ideas than would be reasonable, by disguising the mechanism of arrival at the idea.