Doubt-impedance matching. To persuade smart people, you have to start from a posture of genuine doubt that matches theirs and work both of you into belief together. Belief is a relationship variable, not an individual one. It is founded on mutual information, not private.
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If you don’t level-set on doubt (it looks like “take their temperature and match it”), you’ll either be perceived as delusionally overconfident or even psychotic, or pathologically self-doubting to the point you can’t be trusted in a mutual-belief relationship.
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If impedance-mismatched persuasion works, one of you is an idiot. If you’re confident you can tell, it’s you.if you have no idea, it’s still you. Paradoxically the surest sign that you’re probably not the idiot is the sneaking suspicion that you might be.
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Individuals can’t really “believe” anything. They can only know, not know, or be in a duckrabbit superposition stare. They may know with uncertainty or ambiguity. They may be wrong. But they can’t “believe” “Belief” exists between 2+ people. All belief is at least mutual belief.
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Replying to @vgr
I know the above to be wrong. Actually, I don’t. The strongest I’d go is “I believe this is wrong.” Interestingly, this would imply that at least one other person does, too, thus downgrading “know” to “believe”.
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Replying to @GeneLinetsky
Belief exists above knowledge, so the downgrading would go the other the way
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Replying to @vgr
This is fun. The inversion explains why mobs are dumber than constituent individuals: they mutually (and proudly) don’t know the exact same thing.
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Replying to @GeneLinetsky
Yeah. Knowledge is very unsatisfying unless inflated into a belief with others.pic.twitter.com/DlDuM5tyAK
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Replying to @vgr
At this point in the story, the postconstructivist telling it yawns and points out the obvious: there are no trains, engineers, fields, sheep, or the color black. None of this happened. The point of telling it was belief-impedance calibration.
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Now we’re cooking. You and I believe something 
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