1/ straw-manning the vantage points of others, especially one's ideological opponents, is absurdly easy to do
i think it's the default to turn everyone else's opinions into caricatures to make ourselves feel smarter and more secure in ourselves
Conversation
2/ short-circuiting this straw-manning tendency in favor of really listening to people and honoring the full complexity of their viewpoints is damn difficult
it's also essential for real, honest, compassionate, good-faith dialogue and truth-seeking
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3/ i'm realizing i frequently fail to do this. knowing the definition of "straw man" does not make one immune to the straw-manning tendency
in some ways knowing of various biases actually blinds us to our own errors because we falsely imagine that knowledge of bias = immunity
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4/ i will practice diligently and aim to keep improving
i wish to be able to see others' viewpoints in their full complexity, consider a wide range of possible intended meanings, and imagine vividly the possibility of the truth of their conclusions
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I find the LessWrong community obnoxious beyond belief, but there was that one time Eliezer Yudkowsky described teaching his mom about some bias and claimed her response was "Oh! I can use this in so many ways!" (to browbeat people in conversation)
Illustrative.
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Lately, it seems all the idiots are talking about others "suffering from" Dunning-Kruger effect, which is domain-specific and affects virtually everyone, not some virulent memetic plague.
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hahah
are you sure they're _all_ idiots though? 0_o : P
sidenote: is the dunning-kruger effect domain-specific? the wikipedia page makes it sound like a general thing and that's i think the only source i've ever really read on it
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The people I consider idiots? No, that would be ridiculous.
But I don't mean that only idiots reference Dunning-Kruger. Only that there's a big group of arrogant morons who frequently use it as a means to shut down other people, without showing even a basic understanding of it.