Great article! But then you lose me when you get to the bit about red vs. blue states and communists: you’re basically making inferences from tiny sample sets without comparison to the sample space, effectively making it seem like numerology. (Look at how people were scared of these instances of nines in the past!)
Well I’m certainly speculating and I think I made that reasonably clear. But it isn’t like I came up with this wacky theory about the color red on my own and then set out to find examples of people being scared of red (like in numerology). Rather, I have this hypothesis (which has it’s own evidence) and I’m considering places where this bias could have had an effect. Part of what we have to do as rationalists is identify where biases could enter our own thinking. These are two that occurred to me and when nuclear war is involved even tiny bias effects have huge implications.
Great article! But then you lose me when you get to the bit about red vs. blue states and communists: you’re basically making inferences from tiny sample sets without comparison to the sample space, effectively making it seem like numerology. (Look at how people were scared of these instances of nines in the past!)
Well I’m certainly speculating and I think I made that reasonably clear. But it isn’t like I came up with this wacky theory about the color red on my own and then set out to find examples of people being scared of red (like in numerology). Rather, I have this hypothesis (which has it’s own evidence) and I’m considering places where this bias could have had an effect. Part of what we have to do as rationalists is identify where biases could enter our own thinking. These are two that occurred to me and when nuclear war is involved even tiny bias effects have huge implications.