LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]” by Noosphere89


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This linkpost is in part a response to @Raemon's comment about why the procedure Raemon did doesn't work in practice to deal with the selection effects I talked about in my last post.

So in the last post, I was talking about a selection effect where believers of an argument can come to believe that their idea is true and that their critics are crazy wrong/trolling/dumb, no matter what argument is used.

And the believers are half-right, in that their random error swamps any truth signal/evidence for most critics due to bounded computation for most topics, but they incorrectly perceive that as evidence that their theory is correct, because they don't realize that most possible critics of an idea will have bad criticisms independently of whether your claims are correct.

This was part of what I was trying to get at when I said that selection effects are very [...]

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First published:

October 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YFHcAcKTbRGp2TTb4/the-main-way-i-ve-seen-people-turn-ideologically-crazy

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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