Great post! I would think finding someone with similar interests who often agrees with you is easy. But you’ll get the most value from talking to correct people with very different interests. That’s much harder. They’ll make mistakes you wouldn’t, but also get stuff right you wouldn’t think of.
I would think finding someone with similar interests who often agrees with you is easy.
I saw the person’s correct answers before I saw their interests; it was an interesting coincidence, but not what I used to evaluate the person’s correctness factor.
A possibility worth considering is that correct contrarians share interests by some mechanism related to the general factor of correctness. It also seems easier to work your way from the properties of correct contrarians that you already know about to the general factor of correctness, as opposed to trying to step outside of yourself and imagine what it would be like if you agreed with people that you don’t. It’s true that everyone thinks they’re mostly right and that it’s hard to distinguish between feeling right when you’re wrong and feeling right when you’re right without the benefit of hindsight, but I don’t think that you should just give up your beliefs because there’s some possibility that you’re wrong. It seems easier and more responsible to focus on arriving at agreement with others by posing arguments and observing evidence than to be second-guessing yourself all of the time.
On the other hand, I agree with you in a sense and do very much value people whose thoughts simply fall into completely different grooves than mine. Massimo Pigliucci is my textbook example. A lot of the time when I hear him say things I think he’s wrong. A lot of the times I settle on the belief that he is; but he also surprises me weirdly more often than anyone who thinks like him. Also, people like that offer a useful sample of the sort of mistakes that you should expect if you want to persuade others who make them.
Great post! I would think finding someone with similar interests who often agrees with you is easy. But you’ll get the most value from talking to correct people with very different interests. That’s much harder. They’ll make mistakes you wouldn’t, but also get stuff right you wouldn’t think of.
Thank you.
I saw the person’s correct answers before I saw their interests; it was an interesting coincidence, but not what I used to evaluate the person’s correctness factor.
A possibility worth considering is that correct contrarians share interests by some mechanism related to the general factor of correctness. It also seems easier to work your way from the properties of correct contrarians that you already know about to the general factor of correctness, as opposed to trying to step outside of yourself and imagine what it would be like if you agreed with people that you don’t. It’s true that everyone thinks they’re mostly right and that it’s hard to distinguish between feeling right when you’re wrong and feeling right when you’re right without the benefit of hindsight, but I don’t think that you should just give up your beliefs because there’s some possibility that you’re wrong. It seems easier and more responsible to focus on arriving at agreement with others by posing arguments and observing evidence than to be second-guessing yourself all of the time.
On the other hand, I agree with you in a sense and do very much value people whose thoughts simply fall into completely different grooves than mine. Massimo Pigliucci is my textbook example. A lot of the time when I hear him say things I think he’s wrong. A lot of the times I settle on the belief that he is; but he also surprises me weirdly more often than anyone who thinks like him. Also, people like that offer a useful sample of the sort of mistakes that you should expect if you want to persuade others who make them.