(slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/)

In short:

1. Are there plausibly near-equal groups of people who need this advice versus the opposite advice?
2. Have you self-selected into the group of people receiving this advice by, for example, being a fan of the blog / magazine / TV channel / political party / self-help-movement offering it?
3. Then maybe the opposite advice, for you in particular, is at least as worthy of consideration.

It's a check against being other-optimized (www.greaterwrong.com/posts/6NvbSwuSAooQxxf7f/beware-of-other-optimizing).

When someone advises you, they may unknowingly be other-optimizing, so try reversing the advice.

Q: What are the factors putting you in a group more likely to need reversing the advice?

A pair of comments disturbed me:

builder_m 1 point 2 hours ago

cancel culture är ett påhitt folk som gör och säger dumt skit använder som ursäkt för att komma undan konsekvenser, "funkar" endast om en stor majoritet av personens egna fans bestämmer sig för att överge hen, vilket väldigt väldigt sällan händer.

Breeze1620 9 points 1 hour ago

Vilket skitsnack. Det existerar i allra högsta grad, sen är det absolut så att många slänger med det som ursäkt när de beter sig allmänt förjävligt, men att folk t.ex. fått sina karriärer förstörda, blivit bestraffade, sparkade, fått bokade evenemang inställda osv. osv. som följd av detta är bara fakta.

Som följd av att t.ex. inte ha underkastat sig och börjat använda nyspråk av olika slag, eller på grund av uppfattningar som avviker ifrån de som den blåhåriga extremistmobben har haft eller har. De som förnekar att detta skett och i viss mån kanske ännu sker brukar ofta politiskt luta åt just det hållet. Total förnekelse kring allt som inte överensstämmer med den egna världsbilden är ju ofta deras generella modus operandi.

Ok, look. I feel that we have subgroups in society that correctly recognize many fallacies in their enemies, but it's funny/disturbing that they all recognize the same ones: regardless of which camp they're in, the fallacies are discovered in the enemy. "Their modus operandi is total denial of everything that doesn't agree with their world-view". Which camp said this sentence and who were they speaking of? You can't guess it.

All camps take the enemy's irrationality as a sign that their own is sane. (Yet it cannot be a sign for that; Reversed stupidity is not intelligence)

But it's sad that so many young adults get inducted into one of any of several camps, and once inside the echo chamber, they learn about these fallacies for the first time when the chamber is quoting the outsiders and mocking and joking about their fallacious reasoning. So they grow to believe that irrationality is unusual, and present mainly in that enemy camp.

Only after some life experience where you move between groups, e.g. when you've been both vegan and anti-vegan at different points in life, do you start to see how all groups talk nearly identically.

Sometimes people debate pessimism versus optimism as if you must generally choose one to side with in most aspects of life. Well, not only is it difficult to reach a verdict on such a big question, the fact it's difficult should be a hint that the verdict will be useless in any specific situation. Look at specific situations directly and pick an approach for each.

Actually, it's a wrong question. How did such a debate come to be common in the first place? Why does anyone care which one "wins" overall? Well, let's not care.

I've observed that pessimism should be useful for:

• The planning fallacy
• Planning around ADHD
• Correctly predicting what will happen in … most situations. It's really difficult to undershoot reality so much that you're pleasantly surprised around half the time. Seen through this lens, undershooting it to that extent still isn't more pessimistic than optimistic, it's only reached equality at that point… it just feels like pessimism because we have built-in optimistic biases and so what we wind up having to do consciously is be pessmistic almost all the time.
• Hedonism – pleasant surprises beat disappointments… though this is a standard argument in a debate that bores me, it has a standard counterargument along the lines of "well, maybe expecting so little of the future disenergizes you and then you put in less effort and then you have a self-fulfilling prophecy". For myself, I doubt that.

What I've named the Taber & Lodge trainwreck for now:

1. Prior attitude effect
2. Disconfirmation bias
3. Confirmation bias
4. Attitude polarization
5. Attitude strength effect
6. Sophistication effect
   • whereby a clever arguer who knows about biases and fallacies is more likely to end up stuck in their beliefs

Subvert this trainwreck.

#2 & #3 look easy-ish to subvert: simply try to spend more time denigrating supportive evidence than seems natural & make a habit of seeking out contrary sources to learn more about a topic – it's often an efficient way to learn anyway.

For #4: the habit of seeing equivalently-weighted options as an unimportant choice (because they're worth about the same to you). Also known as the habit of flipping a coin to settle difficult decisions.

For #5: taking a dim view of strongly-professed opinions as if a moron is speaking (because this is often the case) – to counterbalance our instinctive feeling that a strong opinion-haver must know what they're talking about.

Never teach people the following knowledge unless they take seriously that knowing about biases can harm you and are the sort of people to take steps such as above. Some of the following knowledge may be unnecessary anyway, since You don't need to know about biases to debias.

• calibration
• overconfidence effects
• …