nyan’s cached thoughts are better? I mean, it would be nice if we could stop relying on cached thoughts entirely, but there’s just not enough time in the day. A more practical solution is to tend your garden of cached thoughts as best you can. The problem is not just that she has cached thoughts but that her garden is full of weeds she hasn’t noticed.
“Outside view” refers to some threshold of reliability in the details that you keep in a description of a situation. If you throw out all relevant detail, “outside view” won’t be able to tell you anything. If you keep too much detail, “outside view” won’t be different from the inside view (i.e. normal evaluation of the situation that doesn’t invoke this tool). Thus, the decision about which details to keep is important and often non-trivial, in which case simply appealing to something not being “outside view” is not helpful.
I took it to be obvious that “taking the outside view” in the grandparent comment meant dropping the detail that ‘Nyan and everyone here thinks his cached thoughts are better than his sisters’ and so Qiaochu_Yuan’s reply was not answering the question.
I have inside view reasons to believe that nyan’s cached thoughts are genuinely better. If the point you’re trying to make is “repeating cached thoughts is in general not a productive way to have arguments, and you should assume you’re doing this by default,” I agree but don’t think that the outside view is a strong argument supporting this conclusion. And I still think that cached thoughts can be useful. For example, having a cached thought about cached thoughts can be useful.
I agree with all that: my point was just that the question you were replying to asked about the outside view (which in this context I took to mean excluding the fact that we think our cluster of ideas is better than Nyan’s sister’s cluster of ideas). I’m just saying: rationalists can get exploded by philosophical landmines too and it seems worthwhile to be able to avoid that when we want to even though our philosophical limbs are less wrong than most people’s.
Or to put it another way: philosophical landmines seem like a problem for self-skepticism because they keep you from hearing and responding adequately to the concerns of others. So any account of philosophical landmines ought to be neutral on the epistemic content of sloganeering since assuming we’re on the right side of the argument is really bad for self-skepticism.
nyan’s cached thoughts are better? I mean, it would be nice if we could stop relying on cached thoughts entirely, but there’s just not enough time in the day. A more practical solution is to tend your garden of cached thoughts as best you can. The problem is not just that she has cached thoughts but that her garden is full of weeds she hasn’t noticed.
.
“Outside view” refers to some threshold of reliability in the details that you keep in a description of a situation. If you throw out all relevant detail, “outside view” won’t be able to tell you anything. If you keep too much detail, “outside view” won’t be different from the inside view (i.e. normal evaluation of the situation that doesn’t invoke this tool). Thus, the decision about which details to keep is important and often non-trivial, in which case simply appealing to something not being “outside view” is not helpful.
I took it to be obvious that “taking the outside view” in the grandparent comment meant dropping the detail that ‘Nyan and everyone here thinks his cached thoughts are better than his sisters’ and so Qiaochu_Yuan’s reply was not answering the question.
I have inside view reasons to believe that nyan’s cached thoughts are genuinely better. If the point you’re trying to make is “repeating cached thoughts is in general not a productive way to have arguments, and you should assume you’re doing this by default,” I agree but don’t think that the outside view is a strong argument supporting this conclusion. And I still think that cached thoughts can be useful. For example, having a cached thought about cached thoughts can be useful.
I agree with all that: my point was just that the question you were replying to asked about the outside view (which in this context I took to mean excluding the fact that we think our cluster of ideas is better than Nyan’s sister’s cluster of ideas). I’m just saying: rationalists can get exploded by philosophical landmines too and it seems worthwhile to be able to avoid that when we want to even though our philosophical limbs are less wrong than most people’s.
Or to put it another way: philosophical landmines seem like a problem for self-skepticism because they keep you from hearing and responding adequately to the concerns of others. So any account of philosophical landmines ought to be neutral on the epistemic content of sloganeering since assuming we’re on the right side of the argument is really bad for self-skepticism.