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Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence — LessWrong

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He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last. “The standard smother-out technique,” Verkan Vall grinned. “I only heard a little talk about the ‘flying saucers,’ and all of that was in joke. In that order of culture, you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably false, parallel to it.” —H. Beam Piper, Police Operation Piper had a point. Pers’nally, I don’t believe there are any poorly hidden aliens infesting these parts. But my disbelief has nothing to do with the awful embarrassing irrationality of flying saucer cults—at least, I hope not. You and I believe that flying saucer cults arose in the total absence of any flying saucers. Cults can arise around almost any idea, thanks to human silliness. This silliness operates orthogonally to alien intervention: We would expect to see flying saucer cu

x Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence — LessWrong Politics and Rationality Steelmanning Epistemology Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence Distinctions Principles Rationality Frontpage 203 Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky 12th Dec 2007 4 min read 122 203 “. . . then our people on that time-line went to work with corrective action. Here.” He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic than the last. “The standard smo

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