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by coder-3 971 days ago
Raw IQ doesn't mean you'll have good epistemology. His brain lets him reach deeper abstractions than most but it doesn't mean what he comes up with is grounded in base reality. If you're worried about being off-base, try:

- Contact with reality (feedback). Predict, try, did it work?

- Having a good reasoning framework. For some it's 1. Religious text, 2. what others they respect think, 3. reasoning for understanding. This is not the worst but not the best. Perhaps a better one would be 1. Science/rationality, 2. religious/philosophical/spiritual texts, 3. first principles thinking

- Humility, you don't know anything unless you have great reasoning and empirical evidence to back up what you're saying. Even then, when faced with complexity (i.e. unless you are dealing with the most atomic/simple concept), you're still almost certainly wrong.

1 comments

Unfortunately I don't know anything that guarantees a good epistemology. I am quite certain he'd insist he's doing all those things... including humility.