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Notes -
Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
Uh.. Yes? I mean, is this a question worth asking really?
I mean, I wasn't born believing in HBD, I was won over. I used to think that terraforming Mars was a great idea, and now I think it's a rather suboptimal choice when it comes to establishing robust space colonies. I used to think that AI would more inhuman, and very much didn't expect them to speak like us before they thought as well as they do.
I'm sure there are plenty of cases where I've been wrong and thus changed my mind. I don't think I've had any drastic collapses of my cognitive framework that forced me to re-evaluate everything.
This gentleman is autistic. I'm sure we have more than our fair share, but that's a condition that predisposes a tendency to take things at face value without considering how much of it is virtue-signalling or social fiction.
I think you're engaging in the hobby of making up people to be mad at. There are worse hobbies, I'm sure. I'm quite certain that there isn't anyone here who will claim identification with this, unless someone spins up an alt. If there are, I offer my psychiatric services, first interview free.
At any rate, I find singling out Rats and rat-adjacents like the Motte's users as examples of bad epistemics or miscalibration is somewhere between laughable and preaching to the choir. Name a group more obsessed with evaluating the rigor of their beliefs about the world. If someone listened to Yud or Scott and came away with the belief that they themselves were therefore unimpeachable, then they can read an IKEA manual and assemble a mouse-trap that takes their finger off.
If you think we're bad, have you seen the rest of the internet?
I'm skeptical of this as an explanation in this instance, if only because of the fact that if he was predisposed to believe in such nonsensical ideas (whether due to autism or anything else) I don't see how he'd ever have gotten to the state of being taken seriously as a rationalist in the first place. After all, the topic of men vs women in sports won't be only contentious issue he's come across where there's a strong social incentive to take one side over the other.
Also, I know you're the psychiatrist, but wouldn't being autistic make it less likely you'd have the requisite cognitive machinery in place necessary to delude yourself about the state of the world for the purposes of social signalling?
In my unprofessional opinion: Autists accept the signal at face value and then boost it because the original signal comes from a trusted source. No delusion required; it's genuine belief.
IMO (which is also unprofessional!) it's the opposite. It's the autistic person who shouts out that the emperor has no clothes, after all.
Yeah, if nobody they had no reason to mistrust previously informed them that the emperor wore invisible clothes.
Possibly - but then would a person susceptible to such explanations be likely to become a somewhat esteemed rationalist?
Eh? Who is esteeming him? Man's getting like 10 likes on average for his Twitter posts.
This controversy is his most popular post by a country mile.
If "somewhat esteemed rationalist" is a term that can be handed out this generously, I'm going to start calling myself that.
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Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I don't know anything about the specific rationalist in question here, I speak in abstracts, but rationalists have huge blind spots, preferably near their own sacred cows. A rationalist can gain esteem enough by writing on topics other than those.
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