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Covering the all important concept of being able to change your mind this mega sequence is a compilation of 8 subsequences.
This channel includes:
In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in
People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation...
Robin Hanson recently proposed stores where banned products could be sold. There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy-an inherent right of ind
Lady Justice is widely depicted as carrying a scales. A scales has the property that whatever pulls one side down, pushes the other side up. This makes things very convenient and easy to track. It's also usually a gross distortion.
"...then our people on that time-line went to work with corrective action. Here." He wiped the screen and then began punching combinations. Pa
Black Belt Bayesian (aka "steven") tries to explain the asymmetry between good arguments and good authority, but it doesn't seem to be resolving the comments on Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, so let me take my own stab at it: Scenario 1: Barry is a famous geologist.
Continuation of: Argument Screens Off Authority In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue -trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible. The Wright Brothers say, "My plane will fly."
The affect heuristic is when subjective impressions of goodness/badness act as a heuristic-a source of fast, perceptual judgments. Pleasant and unpleasant feel
The affect heuristic is how an overall feeling of goodness or badness contributes to many other judgments, whether it's logical or not, whether you're aware of
Followup to: The Affect Heuristic, The Halo Effect Many, many, many are the flaws in human reasoning which lead us to overestimate how well our beloved theory
Followup to: Affective Death Spirals Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever.
Followup to: Resist the Happy Death Spiral Every now and then, you see people arguing over whether atheism is a "religion". As I touched on in Purpose and Pra
Suppose I spin a Wheel of Fortune device as you watch, and it comes up pointing to 65. Then I ask: Do you think the percentage of African countries in the UN is above or below this number? What do you think is the percentage of African countries in the UN?
Suppose you ask subjects to press one button if a string of letters forms a word, and another button if the string does not form a word. (E.g., "banack" vs. "banner".) Then you show them the string "water". Later, they will more quickly identify the string "drink" as a word.
Some early experiments on anchoring and adjustment tested whether distracting the subjects-rendering subjects cognitively "busy" by asking them to keep a lookout for "5" in strings of numbers, or some such-would decrease adjustment, and hence increase the influence of anchors. Most of the experiments seemed to bear out the idea that cognitive busyness increased anchoring, and more generally contamination.
One of the single greatest puzzles about the human brain is how the damn thing works at all when most neurons fire 10-20 times per second, or 200Hz tops. In ne
Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same... In Artificial Intelligence, everyone outside the field has a cached result for brilliant new revolutionary AI idea -neural networks, which work just like the human brain!
Followup to: Cached Thoughts, The Virtue of Narrowness Since Robert Pirsig put this very well, I'll just copy down what he said. I don't know if this story is based on reality or not, but either way, it's true. He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say.
When I try to introduce the subject of advanced AI, what's the first thing I hear, more than half the time? "Oh, you mean like the Terminator movies / the Matri
I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death. It brought out deep emotions. I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I
"Over the past few years, we have discreetly approached colleagues faced with a choice between job offers, and asked them to estimate the probability that they
From pp. 55-56 of Robyn Dawes's Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Bolding added. Norman R. F. Maier noted that when a group faces a problem, the natural
Followup to: Asch's Conformity Experiment The scary thing about Asch's conformity experiments is that you can get many people to say black is white, if you put them in a room full of other people saying the same thing.
In lists of logical fallacies, you will find included "the genetic fallacy"-the fallacy attacking a belief, based on someone's causes for believing it. This is, at first sight, a very strange idea-if the causes of a belief do not determine its systematic reliability, what does?
(The following happened to me in an IRC chatroom, long enough ago that I was still hanging around in IRC chatrooms. Time has fuzzed the memory and my report ma
From Robyn Dawes's Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: Post-hoc fitting of evidence to hypothesis was involved in a most grievous chapter in United States history: the internment of Japanese-Americans at the beginning of the Second World War.
Hindsight bias is when people who know the answer vastly overestimate its predictability or obviousness, compared to the estimates of subjects who must guess without advance knowledge. Hindsight bias is sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along effect. Fischhoff and Beyth (1975) presented students with historical accounts of unfamiliar incidents, such as a conflict between the Gurkhas and the British in 1814.
This excerpt from Meyers's Exploring Social Psychology is worth reading in entirety. Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up "no ideas or conclusions that can't be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations... Day after day social scientists go out into the world.
I am teaching a class, and I write upon the blackboard three numbers: 2-4-6. "I am thinking of a rule," I say, "which governs sequences of three numbers. The
Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens abou
Politics is the mind-killer. Debate is war, arguments are soldiers. There is the temptation to search for ways to interpret every possible experimental result
Followup to: Update Yourself Incrementally Yesterday I talked about a style of reasoning in which not a single contrary argument is allowed, with the result that every non-supporting observation has to be argued away. Today I suggest that when people encounter a contrary argument, they prevent themselves from downshifting their confidence by rehearsing already-known support.
There are two sealed boxes up for auction, box A and box B. One and only one of these boxes contains a valuable diamond. There are all manner of signs and portents indicating whether a box contains a diamond; but I have no sign which I know to be perfectly reliable.
Yesterday I discussed the dilemma of the clever arguer, hired to sell you a box that may or may not contain a diamond. The clever arguer points out to you that
Followup to: The Bottom Line, What Evidence Filtered Evidence? In "The Bottom Line", I presented the dilemma of two boxes only one of which contains a diamond, with various signs and portents as evidence. I dichotomized the curious inquirer and the clever arguer.
Followup to: The Bottom Line, Rationalization You are, by occupation, a campaign manager, and you've just been hired by Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, the Green candid
A few years back, my great-grandmother died, in her nineties, after a long, slow, and cruel disintegration. I never knew her as a person, but in my distant chi
Followup to: The Third Alternative, The Meditation on Curiosity While I disagree with some views of the Fast and Frugal crowd-IMO they make a few too many lemons into lemonade-it also seems to me that they tend to develop the most psychologically realistic models of any school of decision theory.
I am not wholly unsympathetic to the many commenters in Torture vs. Dust Specks who argued that it is preferable to inflict dust specks upon the eyes of 3^^^3 (amazingly huge but finite number of) people, rather than torture one person for 50 years.
Many Christians who've stopped really believing now insist that they revere the Bible as a source of ethical advice. The standard atheist reply is given by Sam
Followup to: Fake Justification, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism I've previously dwelt in considerable length upon forms of rationalization whereby our beliefs appear to match the evidence much more strongly than they actually do. And I'm not overemphasizing the point, either.
It happens every now and then, that the one encounters some of my transhumanist-side beliefs-as opposed to my ideas having to do with human rationality-strange,
"One of your very early philosophers came to the conclusion that a fully competent mind, from a study of one fact or artifact belonging to any given universe,
Followup to: Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies Judge Marcus Einfeld, age 70, Queens Counsel since 1977, Australian Living Treasure 1997, United Nations Peace Award 2002, founding president of Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, retired a few years back but routinely brought back to judge important cases...
Followup to: Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy. I have previously spoken of the notion that, the tru
Followup to: Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute? So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads
I remember the exact moment when I began my journey as a rationalist. It was not while reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman or any existing work upon rationality; for these I simply accepted as obvious.
An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was a photograph,
Followup to: Belief in Belief I recently spoke with a person who... it's difficult to describe. Nominally, she was an Orthodox Jew. She was also highly intel
Continuation of: No, Really, I've Deceived Myself Followup to: Dark Side Epistemology I spoke yesterday of my conversation with a nominally Orthodox Jewish woman who vigorously defended the assertion that she believed in God, while seeming not to actually believe in God at all.
Followup to: Belief in Self-Deception Moore's Paradox is the standard term for saying "It's raining outside but I don't believe that it is." HT to painquale on MetaFilter. I think I understand Moore's Paradox a bit better now, after reading some of the comments on Less Wrong.
Followup to: Moore's Paradox, Doublethink I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if yo
It is widely recognized that good science requires some kind of humility. What sort of humility is more controversial. Consider the creationist who says: "But who can really know whether evolution is correct? It is just a theory. You should be more humble and open-minded." Is this humility?
"Believing in Santa Claus gives children a sense of wonder and encourages them to behave well in hope of receiving presents. If Santa-belief is destroyed by t
Suppose that the police of Largeville, a town with a million inhabitants, are investigating a murder in which there are few or no clues-the victim was stabbed t
Years ago, I was speaking to someone when he casually remarked that he didn't believe in evolution. And I said, "This is not the nineteenth century. When Darw
Followup to: Tsuyoku Naritai, But There's Still A Chance Right? The Sophisticate: "The world isn't black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It
Followup to: But There's Still A Chance Right?, The Fallacy of Gray The one comes to you and loftily says: "Science doesn't really know anything. All you hav
In "What is Evidence?", I wrote: This is why rationalists put such a heavy premium on the paradoxical-seeming claim that a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind...
Followup to: How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3, Absolute Authority In Absolute Authority, I argued that you don't need infinite certainty: "If you have to ch
Followup to: Infinite Certainty 1, 2, and 3 are all integers, and so is -4. If you keep counting up, or keep counting down, you're bound to encounter a whole
A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion-that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of be
I just finished reading a history of Enron's downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room, which hereby wins my award for "Least Appropriate Book Title". An unsurprising feature of Enron's slow rot and abrupt collapse was that the executive players never admitted to having made a large mistake.
When I was very young-I think thirteen or maybe fourteen-I thought I had found a disproof of Cantor's Diagonal Argument, a famous theorem which demonstrates tha
Casey Serin, a 24-year-old web programmer with no prior experience in real estate, owes banks 2.2 million dollars after lying on mortgage applications in order
Once, when I was holding forth upon the Way, I remarked upon how most organized belief systems exist to flee from doubt. A listener replied to me that the Jesuits must be immune from this criticism, because they practice organized doubt: their novices, he said, are told to doubt Christianity; doubt the existence of God; doubt if their calling is real; doubt that they are suitable for perpetual vows of chastity and poverty.
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there t
"The first virtue is curiosity." -The Twelve Virtues of Rationality As rationalists, we are obligated to criticize ourselves and question our beliefs... are we not? Consider what happens to you, on a psychological level, if you begin by saying: "It is my duty to criticize my own beliefs."
Followup to: Tsuyoku Naritai, Circular Altruism In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated motif: Power comes from having somethin
Traditional Rationality is phrased in terms of social rules, with violations interpretable as cheating-as defections from cooperative norms. If you want me to
"When you surround the enemy Always allow them an escape route. They must see that there is An alternative to death." -Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Cloud Ha
Followup to: Make an Extraordinary Effort, The Meditation on Curiosity, Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points "It ain't a true crisis of faith unless things
Followup to: The Failures of Eld Science, Crisis of Faith The room in which Jeffreyssai received his non- beisutsukai visitors was quietly formal, impeccably appointed in only the most conservative tastes. Sunlight and outside air streamed through a grillwork of polished silver, a few sharp edges making it clear that this wall was not to be opened.