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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#171

Post by axlprose »

robrenaud wrote: post #151
programmarchy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchec…

Do you really follow this? It seems like someone following these rules would rarely be wrong, but that they'd be paralyzed by the cost of making decisions.

From my own experience and observing others, that indeed seems to be the logical conclusion of it, and it's something that I see happen a lot. "Analysis Paralysis" a friend of mines likes to call it. It can be mildly annoying at times, but it seems like something that a lot of people aren't able to help doing. Or at least not without a lot of practice and experience.

Re: How You Know

#172

Post by calebm »

There's a quote which I (ironically) can't remember about how a mind is made up of the books it has read in much the same way as a lion is made of of the animals it consumes. Or to put it another way, "you are what you eat."

Re: How You Know

#173

Post by mherdeg »

jayro wrote: post #170
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account." - http://mindhacks.com/2011/05/04/why-the-truth-will-out-but-d... Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190

I've always wanted a short name for this phenomenon, where a lie takes hold and never leaves no matter how thoroughly it is debunked. Maybe the 'swift boat effect'?

Re: How You Know

#174

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #152
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: How You Know

#176

Post by [deleted] »

nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

[deleted]

Re: How You Know

#177

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelGG wrote: post #168
[deleted] wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You're overestimating the difficulty of Facebook by over a factor of 50. Not to mention similar systems already existed. In fact, this is the first time I remember someone claiming that actually building the FB initial product was challenging (versus timing, acting on the idea, marketing, etc.) Edit: parent comment was saying it's so much easier to with work with inexperienced people, and that an experienced "corpora…

[deleted]

Re: How You Know

#178

Post by swah »

On some level we don't really forget - when you reread a book it comes back to you like a stream, all the insights and connections appearing stronger and clearer than before.

Re: How You Know

#179

Post by robg »

Not for nothing, the laying of new memories in the brain is exactly context sensitive. The hippocampus is actively weighting new information based on what we already know. And emotion hacks the hippocampal patterns that much more.

Re: How You Know

#180

Post by argumentum »

gatehouse wrote: post #43
arjunnarayan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot…

For an example of this, ask yourself: What is the world population? The longer it has been since you checked, the further off the number will be. https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population

Unless you've checked the number enough to have realized a pattern (in this case a growth rate).
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