Separate magisteria
From Lesswrongwiki
Revision as of 10:25, 16 May 2011 by Vladimir Nesov (talk | contribs) (moved text from Examples of compartmentalization)
Compartmentalization, or division of types of activity on separate magisteria is a tendency to restrict application of a generally-applicable skill, such as scientific method, only to select few contexts. More generally, the concept refers to not following a piece of knowledge to its logical conclusion, or not taking it seriously.
A common phenomenon in humans is excellent epistemological performance in one domain - and terrible performance in others. This phenomenon undermines 'appeals to authority' but also shows that someone holding an obviously false belief can still be worth learning from.
Blog posts
- Outside the Laboratory
- Reason as memetic immune disorder by Phil Goetz
- That Magical Click - Fast following of short inference chains might be a capability of people who fail to compartmentalize
- Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality by Anna Salamon
- The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist by Yvain
See also
- Semantic stopsign, Anti-epistemology
- Cached thought
- Shut up and multiply, Bite the bullet, Absurdity heuristic
- Dangerous knowledge
- General knowledge, Understanding
