I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the rationality mistakes I’ve made in the past. Here’s an interesting one: I think I have historically been too hasty to go from “other people seem very wrong on this topic” to “I am right on this topic”.

Throughout my life, I’ve often thought that other people had beliefs that were really repugnant and stupid. Now that I am older and wiser, I still think I was correct to think that these ideas were repugnant and stupid. Overall I was probably slightly insufficiently dismissive of things like the opinions of apparent domain experts and the opinions of people who seemed smart whose arguments I couldn’t really follow. I also overrated conventional wisdom about factual claims about how the world worked, though I underrated conventional wisdom about how to behave.

Examples of ideas where I thought the conventional wisdom was really dumb:

I thought that animal farming was a massive moral catastrophe, and I thought it was a sign of terrible moral failure that almost everyone around me didn’t care about this and wasn’t interested when I brought it up.
I thought that AI safety was a big deal, and I thought the arguments against it were all pretty stupid. (Nowadays the conventional wisdom has a much higher opinion of AI safety; I’m talking about 2010-2014.)
I thought that people have terrible taste in economic policy, and that they mostly vote for good-sounding stuff that stops sounding good if you think about it properly for even a minute
I was horrified by people proudly buying products that said “Made in Australia” on them; I didn’t understand how that wasn’t obviously racist, and I thought that we should make it much easier to allow anyone who wants to to come live in Australia. (This one has become much less controversial since Trump inadvertently convinced liberals that they should be in favor of immigration liberalization.)
I thought and still think that a lot of people’s arguments about why it’s good to call the police on bike thieves were dumb. See eg many of the arguments people made in response to a post of mine about this (that in fairness was a really dumb post, IMO)

I think I was right about other people being wrong. However, I think that my actual opinions on these topics were pretty confused and wrong, much more than I thought at the time. Here’s how I updated my opinion for all the things above:

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