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Re­v­ersed Stu­pidity Is Not Intelligence

TagLast edit: 21 Oct 2009 3:23 UTC by Zack_M_Davis

It takes a lot of evidence and rationality just to locate a good hypothesis in the search space. Getting it right is a precise Art, whereas there are a million ways to get it wrong. A stopped clock is right twice a day; answering true-or-false questions at entirely at random will still yield a fifty percent success rate. To do better, you can’t just perform a reversal of an obvious fallacy. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; faulty reasoning does not produce “antitrue” conclusions that can just be negated; the true theory should make sense on its own terms; not just as a refutation of some nonsense.

Blog posts

By Eliezer Yudkowsky

Re­vis­it­ing the Man­i­fold Hypothesis

Aidan Rocke1 Oct 2023 23:55 UTC
10 points
19 comments4 min readLW link

Re­v­ersed stu­pidity some­times pro­vides use­ful information

Scott Alexander28 Sep 2011 10:28 UTC
25 points
13 comments3 min readLW link

Ab­solute Authority

Eliezer Yudkowsky8 Jan 2008 3:33 UTC
97 points
78 comments7 min readLW link

Re­v­ersed Stu­pidity Is Not Intelligence

Eliezer Yudkowsky12 Dec 2007 22:14 UTC
166 points
119 comments3 min readLW link