A while back, I posted on my blog twolists with the posts I considered the most useful on Overcoming Bias so far.
If I just had to pick one? That’s tough, but perhaps burdensome details. The skill of both cutting away all the useless details from predictions, and seeing the burdensome details in the predictions of others.
An example: Even though I was pretty firmly an atheist before, arguments like “people have received messages from the other side, so there might be a god” wouldn’t have appeared structurally in error. I would have questioned whether or not people really had received messages from the dead, but not the implication. Now I see the mistake—“there’s something after death” and “there is a supernatural entity akin to the traditional Christian god” may be hypotheses that are traditionally (in this culture) asssociated with the same memeplex, but as hypotheses they’re entirely distinct.
A while back, I posted on my blog two lists with the posts I considered the most useful on Overcoming Bias so far.
If I just had to pick one? That’s tough, but perhaps burdensome details. The skill of both cutting away all the useless details from predictions, and seeing the burdensome details in the predictions of others.
An example: Even though I was pretty firmly an atheist before, arguments like “people have received messages from the other side, so there might be a god” wouldn’t have appeared structurally in error. I would have questioned whether or not people really had received messages from the dead, but not the implication. Now I see the mistake—“there’s something after death” and “there is a supernatural entity akin to the traditional Christian god” may be hypotheses that are traditionally (in this culture) asssociated with the same memeplex, but as hypotheses they’re entirely distinct.
I would vote for “Burdensome Details” as well.