Once, for a programming assignment in school, I wrote code that I knew would work
That’s fine. The trick is ensuring that the inner conviction matches the reality. If you’d written the code, were sure that it would work, but it didn’t, what would you have concluded?
In another thread, Eliezer addressed a question to another poster: what do autistic-types know about normal people that normal people don’t know about themselves? There’s a very general answer: people with unusual minds know not to trust the intuitions that normal people never think to question.
Don’t trust your intuition, don’t trust your emotions, don’t trust your memory, don’t trust your senses.
They all lie to you.
To a greater or lesser degree, for sure… but it’s hard to see your own filters, and you especially can’t trust that voice that tells you “I have no filters”.
In another thread, Eliezer addressed a question to another poster: what do autistic-types know about normal people that normal people don’t know about themselves? There’s a very general answer: people with unusual minds know not to trust the intuitions that normal people never think to question.
Yes.
Don’t trust your intuition, don’t trust your emotions, don’t trust your memory, don’t trust your senses.
They all lie to you.
To a greater or lesser degree, for sure… but it’s hard to see your own filters, and you especially can’t trust that voice that tells you “I have no filters”.
But act, largely, based on what they tell you.
Well yes. Our input is heavily filtered, but it’s still the only input we get—so it’s all we have to act upon.
The best we can do is to become more aware of its limitations (eg our biases) and try to compensate for them as much as possible.
“reasoning under uncertainty” and all that :)