Rules for living in a 99.9+% lizardman world

Ah, that's just a 1,000:1 odds ratio update. Strong evidence is common [LW · GW]. It's quite straightforward to get the evidence that you are not a lizardman.

If a lizardman is one who is combative about an unpopular opinion which they hold, and the world is 99.9% lizardman, then that means that only 700 million people in the world are not combative about any of their unpopular views. I suppose that you could recognize that you're just a generally chilled out person who doesn't get into arguments or complain, and has a common-sense worldview that most people agree with. After all, lizardman doesn't have to have all unpopular views - just one that they're combative about. They could still be calm and conformist in most areas of life.

You could use things like being able to outperform the market, being consistently ahead of the Overton window, finding a reception for your less objectively verifiable ideas among (a small group of) other high-performing individuals. This doesn't guarantee that you're not still a lizardman among the 99.9%+ lizardmen, just in a high-performing contrarian cluster (hence my rule #1), but at least rules out being a crazy person living in a normal world (unless you're just hallucinating all of the evidence, but there's no point worrying about that).

That post made me write this post, but I'm not sure that I'm referring to the same thing. Basically I mean something like "people whose beliefs or actions are so unreasonable, even on things that they should have thought long and hard about, that they seem to belong to a different species from myself." Like Robin Hanson in this tweet or Elizer Yudkowsky when he thought he would singlehandedly solve all the philosophical problems associated with building a Friendly AI (looks like I can't avoid giving examples after all). I'm pretty sure these two belong in the top 0.1 percentile of all humans as far as being reasonable, hence the title.