Comment by wware on The Shadow Question · 2009-10-17T03:30:46.048Z · LW · GW

Ouch, I got it wrong. I thought it was talking about the radio program from my father's childhood. The tagline I had in mind was, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows." Yikes, dating myself.

The silly examples with the library book reminded me of the idea that if you're sitting on a local maximum of the fitness function, any direction you go is down. I think that's why these shadow questions are hard: they are asking you to change your status quo, which almost certainly means coming down (at least temporarily) from a local maximum. I suppose that's why smart people can sometimes seem so over-analytical about big changes. They're smart enough to already be sitting on a pretty good local maximum, and smart enough to recognize that any tradeoffs involved may be complicated.