(Apologies in advance to the sort-of-off-topic nature of this comment. As you’ll see shortly, I had little choice.)
I was wondering, is there an avenue for us non-contributor readers to raise questions we think would be interesting to discuss? As far as I know, there are no public overcoming bias forums or mailing lists where everybody can post. One could ask questions in the comment sections in this blog, but that would be hijacking the commentaries to subjects other than what was actually said in the post—and I believe I’ve already seen at least one admonishment for a commenter to stick to the topic. Is it best to just post a question in the comments anyway, and trust for one of the regular contributors to make a real post about it if it’s deemed interesting enough?
(As for the specific question I had in mind—I was wondering how careful one should be to avoid generalization from fictional evidence [described as a fallacy here, but I’d interprete it as a bias as well—which raises another potentially interesting question, how much overlap is there between fallacies and bias?]. When writing about artificial intelligence, for instance, would it be acceptable to mention Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect as a fictional example of an AI whose “morality programming” breaks down when conditions shift to ones its designer had not thought about? Or would it be better to avoid fictional examples entirely and stick purely to the facts?)
(Apologies in advance to the sort-of-off-topic nature of this comment. As you’ll see shortly, I had little choice.)
I was wondering, is there an avenue for us non-contributor readers to raise questions we think would be interesting to discuss? As far as I know, there are no public overcoming bias forums or mailing lists where everybody can post. One could ask questions in the comment sections in this blog, but that would be hijacking the commentaries to subjects other than what was actually said in the post—and I believe I’ve already seen at least one admonishment for a commenter to stick to the topic. Is it best to just post a question in the comments anyway, and trust for one of the regular contributors to make a real post about it if it’s deemed interesting enough?
(As for the specific question I had in mind—I was wondering how careful one should be to avoid generalization from fictional evidence [described as a fallacy here, but I’d interprete it as a bias as well—which raises another potentially interesting question, how much overlap is there between fallacies and bias?]. When writing about artificial intelligence, for instance, would it be acceptable to mention Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect as a fictional example of an AI whose “morality programming” breaks down when conditions shift to ones its designer had not thought about? Or would it be better to avoid fictional examples entirely and stick purely to the facts?)