“Being a thousand shards of desire isn’t always fun, but at least it’s not boring.”
I like that. I have a feeling Lord Gautama would have liked it too.
I will venture to say that Eliezer’s habit (this isn’t the first instance) of teasing out the same subject again and again from slightly different angles is highly illuminating for me, at least. (And, I suspect, for him as well… though that’s conjecture).
I’m a bit slower than your average Overcoming Bias lurker, it would seem from the level of discourse here. Sometimes I think I barely grasp what everyone is even talking about, though I try to read the background links people provide. But I’m an intelligent person in general, and I have an interest in the concepts and methods Robin, Eliezer and the rest hash out in this space. You could argue that all humans do, whether they realize it or not. Either Eliezer added something new to this post, or reading post after post on this has finally hammered the point through my brain. But this evening I feel like I finally get it, and by “it” I mean merely the most basic concepts.… I grasped them abstractly right away, but more important for overcoming one’s own operating biases is really getting it in a way that will allow one to spot one’s faulty reasoning in the past and the future.
It seems like one of the key factors in your story, Eliezer, is that you had read that book on math cranks. You were able to make the leap from your project of disproving Cantor and see its implications for the rest of your life thanks in part to having the example of the math crank in your mind.
Seeking evidence outside the immediate domain of inquiry can be tricky because it might lead one to include evidence that has no bearing on the actual problem, but because human endeavors don’t happen in a vacuum, it’s a great way of checking yourself for more general errors (like tilting at windmills).