DiscoverLessWrong (30+ Karma)“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]” by Noosphere89
“The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]” by Noosphere89

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

Update: 2025-10-24
Share

Description

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 [...]

---


First published:

October 23rd, 2025



Source:

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


---


Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Comments 
In Channel
loading
00:00
00:00
x

0.5x

0.8x

1.0x

1.25x

1.5x

2.0x

3.0x

Sleep Timer

Off

End of Episode

5 Minutes

10 Minutes

15 Minutes

30 Minutes

45 Minutes

60 Minutes

120 Minutes

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

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