Selective listening is a real problem. It’s really hard to listen to someone when you think you already know what they’re going to say; the words get filtered through our biases and expectations, and sometimes those filters remove the important bits. I want to talk about a specific way I've seen this happen. I don't know if there's a name for it already, so I'm going to call it the counterargument collapse until someone suggests a better term.
The pattern I’m talking about is three levels of progression through an argument, followed by a misunderstanding that collapses the discussion in an unpleasant way.
Level 1: A naive but widely accepted statement (“Eat less fat if you... (read 920 more words →)
I found LessWrong two(ish) years ago in kind of a weird way. I was looking for critiques of C.S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man, and the best one I found was this LessWrong post discussing the book. From there, I found The Sequences, Effective Altruism, and the SlateStarCodex subreddit. I recently moved to the Tri-Cities, WA area, far away from any of the rationalist/EA meetups I’m aware of. If anyone else is in the area, I’d love to connect!
You summed up my entire post in a single meme! That is amazing!