LESSWRONG
LW

761
Wikitags

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

Edited by Zack_M_Davis, et al. last updated 24th Sep 2020

It takes a lot of evidence and rationality just to locate a good hypothesis in the search space. Getting it right is a precise Art, whereas there are a million ways to get it wrong. A stopped clock is right twice a day; answering true-or-false questions at entirely at random will still yield a fifty percent success rate. To do better, you can't just perform a reversal of an obvious fallacy. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; faulty reasoning does not produce "antitrue" conclusions that can just be negated; the true theory should make sense on its own terms; not just as a refutation of some nonsense.

Blog posts

  • Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
Subscribe
Discussion
Subscribe
Discussion
Posts tagged Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
192Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
122
116Absolute Authority
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
78
25Reversed stupidity sometimes provides useful information
Scott Alexander
14y
13
13Revisiting the Manifold Hypothesis
Aidan Rocke
2y
19
Add Posts