Epistemic status: Reasonably confident in the basic mechanism.

Have you noticed that you keep encountering the same ideas over and over? You read another post, and someone helpfully points out it's just old Paul's idea again. Or Eliezer's idea. Not much progress here, move along.

Or perhaps you've been on the other side: excitedly telling a friend about some fascinating new insight, only to hear back, "Ah, that's just another version of X." And something feels not quite right about that response, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

I want to propose that while ideas are sometimes genuinely that repetitive, there's often a sneakier mechanism at play. I call it Conceptual Rounding Errors – when our mind's necessary compression goes a bit too far .

Too much compression

A Conceptual Rounding Error occurs when we encounter a new mental model or idea that's partially—but not fully—overlapping [...]

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Outline:

(01:00) Too much compression

(01:24) No, This Isnt The Old Demons Story Again

(02:52) The Compression Trade-off

(03:37) More of this

(04:15) What Can We Do?

(05:28) When It Matters

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First published:
March 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FGHKwEGKCfDzcxZuj/conceptual-rounding-errors

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.