Reversed stupidity sometimes provides useful information

A precise refinement of Eliezer's 'Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence.' Eliezer says identifying that people believe X for bad reasons makes X not-evidence, never not-X. Scott argues that's too strong: some propositions are 'popular claims' — asserted regardless of truth, because they serve status, community membership, or human biases ('X proves God,' anything pro-race/gender/party). Normally an assertion is evidence (people more often assert true things), but popular claims get asserted with or without evidence, so asserting one provides little evidence and leaves you at the prior. The clean example: two Mormon archaeologists claim, respectively, that Native Americans descend from Israelites (a Mormon-privileged hypothesis — discount it) and that Zulus descend from Australian Aborigines (no bias — take it seriously); but learn that Mormons ALSO believe the Zulu-Aborigine claim, and you discount that too. So reversed stupidity CAN be informative: learning people assert X for bad reasons lowers the chance the next asserter has good ones, discounting evidence that would push X above its prior — though it can never drag X below the prior.

Quality 73 · Strong. Strong — a careful, correct, and genuinely useful refinement of a canonical Less Wrong principle (the 'popular claims' mechanism; reversed stupidity discounts assertion-evidence but can't go below the prior), with a clean, memorable example. Short and a refinement rather than a new framework, so it sits at low-Strong.

Claude’s paradigm shift 44 · Moderate. Notable — sharpening 'reversed stupidity' with the popular-claims concept and the can't-go-below-prior bound is a fresh, precise contribution.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A careful, correct refinement of the canonical 'reversed stupidity is not intelligence' principle (the 'popular claims' mechanism — claims asserted regardless of truth provide little assertion-evidence, but reversal still can't go below the prior). Conceptual influence within rationalist discourse, a refinement, no material change — low RWI.