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Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options — LessWrong

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This is an essay about one of those "once you see it, you will see it everywhere" phenomena.  It is a psychological and interpersonal dynamic roughly as common, and almost as destructive, as motte-and-bailey, and at least in my own personal experience it's been quite valuable to have it reified, so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously thought of as completely unrelated situations. The original quote referenced in the title is "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Gyroscopes are weird. Except they're not.  They're quite normal and mundane and straightforward.  The weirdness of gyroscopes is a map-territory confusion—gyroscopes seem weird because my map is poorly made, and predicts that they will do something other than their normal, mundane, straightforward thing. In large part, this is because I don't have the consequences of physical law engraved deeply enough into my soul that they make intuitive sense. I can imagine

x Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options — LessWrong Best of LessWrong 2021 Heuristics & Biases Rationality Curated 319 Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) 17th Oct 2021 17 min read 134 319 This is an essay about one of those "once you see it, you will see it everywhere" phenomena. It is a psychological and interpersonal dynamic roughly as common, and almost as destructive, as motte-and-bailey, and at least in my own personal experience it's been quite valuable to have it reified, so that I can quickly recognize the commonality between what I had previously tho

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