Opus was harranguing me about the effortless updates point, as it was the shakiest claim in the essay. Anyway, I stand by it, with the caveat that once you fully understand a point, an update should be effortless. If it isn’t, and if you’re reluctant to do the update s.t. your updates don’t look like a random walk, it’s likely that you’re being pressured into doing one anyway. This is what I’d call a fake update.
As to the example you gave, well: if you need to rely on expert consensus, then you don’t actually understand the point being made. And if you need to think about if for a while, again, you don’t understand the point being made.
This is, I think, a fairly weak position because I’m ignoring all of the sweat that goes into understanding a concept, which in and of itself can require building a lot of new cognitive structures and links between thoughts. Calling those changes updates seems sensible to me, and now I think I’ve argued myself out of my initial claim. Some updates are effortless, perhaps even most, but many aren’t.
The basic problem is epistemic learned helplessness. You know that your own reasoning process isn’t perfect and that there are arguments that are wrong, but which you can’t detect as wrong. In other words, “once you fully understand a point” is a state that you, an imperfect reasoner, can’t know you are in. Advice on what to do in that state is therefore useless. You need advice on what to do when you seem to be in that state, which may be different than advice on what to do if you know for sure that you’re in that state.
Opus was harranguing me about the effortless updates point, as it was the shakiest claim in the essay. Anyway, I stand by it, with the caveat that once you fully understand a point, an update should be effortless. If it isn’t, and if you’re reluctant to do the update s.t. your updates don’t look like a random walk, it’s likely that you’re being pressured into doing one anyway. This is what I’d call a fake update.
As to the example you gave, well: if you need to rely on expert consensus, then you don’t actually understand the point being made. And if you need to think about if for a while, again, you don’t understand the point being made.
This is, I think, a fairly weak position because I’m ignoring all of the sweat that goes into understanding a concept, which in and of itself can require building a lot of new cognitive structures and links between thoughts. Calling those changes updates seems sensible to me, and now I think I’ve argued myself out of my initial claim. Some updates are effortless, perhaps even most, but many aren’t.
The basic problem is epistemic learned helplessness. You know that your own reasoning process isn’t perfect and that there are arguments that are wrong, but which you can’t detect as wrong. In other words, “once you fully understand a point” is a state that you, an imperfect reasoner, can’t know you are in. Advice on what to do in that state is therefore useless. You need advice on what to do when you seem to be in that state, which may be different than advice on what to do if you know for sure that you’re in that state.