Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

lesswrong.com

54 pointsb-man17 comments

"Corollaries of this principle:

" * To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. Arguing against weaker advocates proves nothing, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates."

This reminds me of a plea I made to HN participants

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555734

to avoid ad-hominem arguments against controversial claims when facts are available to refute the claim without reference to who supports the claim. Sometimes people with mostly bad ideas have a correct opinion or two.

The least convenient path is the only valid one.

This should be a law in political discourse.

I initially thought, "Contradicts Occam's Razor..." But then I thought more. It also contradicts physics and the path of least resistance.

But doesn't life contradict physics? Why should there be something that wants to take energy from its surroundings? What about entropy? Life contradicts entropy. Why do things want to make order out of a universe that tends toward disorder?

And thinking like that, that life is a contradiction of physical laws, it makes sense that people want to take the least convenient path. People are irrational. They do want to work hard.

So many times, people ask for something and propose a difficult solution and I say, "What about this?" and they come back with all the reasons that that simple solution I proposed isn't going to work. The only valid solution in their mind requires effort on part of an entire organization of people, when the could just setup an auto-reminder for themselves.

I was viewing this only from the political context with valid meaning intellectually honest. Unfortunately, in the political context, people do follow the path of least resistance. Why attack the strong positions when you only have to attack the addle-minded fools? For proof, please visit the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report. They both serve as a barometer of opposing but equal intellectual dishonesty.

Yes. I tend to disagree with members of both the far right and far left, but there are brilliant people at both ends. Whenever I talk about Pat Buchanan around a group of liberals, they go nuts, but I think he speaks well and his arguments are well reasoned and articulate. I actually agree with him a lot of times and I love watching the McLaughlin Group. John always gives Pat the first shot.

It may be because Pat Buchanan has such fine examples of articulation and argumentation as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_byv2uQHEI

Failure to update in light of evidence is most definitely an indicator against brilliance.

I just wasted 4+ minutes of life watching that video. I saw no smack down or anything unbrilliant about what he said. I didn't make out anything brilliant either i'm just saying I don't see any relevance in that video to anything I said before you posted a link to it.

Rachel Maddow mentions Dana Milbank's quote, explaining how it is not what Obama said and how it came to be misattributed to him. She talks about other stuff, someone else talks about other stuff, and Pat Buchanan comes in reading Dana Milbank's quote and commenting on it as though they were Obama's words, despite the refutation of the quote in the media at large and the refutation given by one of the participants only several minutes earlier.

I only posted the video to illustrate that he can say 'A' only seconds after someone has explained, indeed, 'not A'. Whether or not you accept the explanation of 'not A', reasoned discourse requires addressing, rather than ignoring, such a statement.

Maybe, but man. Once you start saying seemingly nice things about Hitler people just tune you out.

Universal entropy is always increasing but put another way - to reduce local entropy work must be done. Life is local order and demands work, this is true whether we are talking biology or culture.

The path of least resistance isn't necessarily the fastest path to entropy, and the path of most resistance isn't necessarily going against entropy.

A meandering river can go on for hundreds of miles, but only cover about ten miles from start to finish of a section. We as humans will innately wind our way following the path of least resistance presented, however as humans we're benefited more by taking a few bumps and going down the hill.

We'll readily take weeks to do something that may only take hours, why? Because right now it's easier to meander.

Imagine the streams that run into the desert, they'll meander for miles and die off before they get to the ocean where as if they covered the same distance in a straight line it would have reached the ocean.

Humans are innately beings of entropy. Everything we do increases entropy. Our ancestors a thousand years ago levelled mountainsides to build towns, they moved thousands of tons of stone from hundreds of feet in the air, to within 20 feet of the ground in a feat that would have taken nature a million years.

I understand what's meant by this statement, and I agree with the intentions, but it oversimplifies matters. It's not necessarily true that the next-least-convenient path is invalid.

For example, suppose I want to argue against the statement that we have been visited by poorly-hidden aliens. I could go find all the compelling arguments that we have been so visited, and refute them. Alternatively, I could examine all possible poor hiding places, and demonstrate that there are no aliens in these places. I can refute the arguments, or I can disprove the conclusion.

Both of these approaches are valid. One is necessarily more convenient than the other, and thus is not the most convenient.

The larger point (that refuting a poor argument is meaningless) still stands on its own, and that should be a law in political discourse.

Agreed.

The point is that you should argue against the best theory advanced by the strongest proponent of the poorly-hidden alien crowd. How you argue against that point doesn't really matter, so long as you're being intellectually honest. (no ad hominem, straw men, etc)

What the article is arguing against, is the method of dismissing the poorly-hidden alien theory, because some crackpot who advances it believes that aliens live in his bathroom drain.

One cannot simply inspect this one drain, find no evidence of extraterrestrial life and then dismiss the entire poorly-hidden alien theory.

My point is that you don't necessarily need to argue against a particular theory at all.

The entire rest of the post is pretty good; it's just that one particular part can be misleading if taken in isolation.

The "reversed stupidity is not intelligence" principle and its corollaries are all true, but only trivially so. In fact, many good ideas and opportunities can be found simply by reversing what stupid people are doing (intelligent people, even). Stupidity is more than falsehood. It's a certain kind of attunement to the world: conformist, short-sighted, demanding. By seeking it out and "reversing" it, you can often find new and fruitful directions to explore.

Here is a down-home example. I have a couple friends who occasionally give me advice. For them, it's probably good advice. But not for me. One day, it occurred to me to always do the opposite of whatever they said. Wonderful results! I would never have thought of some of these things without their advice.

Does this mean to run headlong against everything you hear? Of course not. That would be stupid.

Do we often read that when beginning a startup, you should do the opposite of what big enbcumbant companies are doing?

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