hmm… well, it was an interesting month but I’m not sure I didn’t enjoy this blog more when it was a blog just about, well, overcoming bias. Eliezer, perhaps you should have your own blog...
BTW I saw you on the TV the other night, talking about the singularity.
It’s always odd, isn’t it, seeing a person for the first time whom you have previously known only in writing. As always, you didn’t look/sound at all like I expected.
Which led me to an interesting line of thought: why does reading someone’s writing produce any expectation at all of what the person looks/sounds like? It’s a bias. Is there a halo effect: we expect intelligent writers to look tall and beautiful? Or is there a einstein-bias: we expect intelligent writers to be wild-looking with messy hair, talking quickly?
Anyway, there you were on the screen. Looking different. “Quick!”, I yelled to my wife, who was in the kitchen, “quick, come here! It’s Eliezer Yudkowsky!”
hmmm...perhaps I need to get out more.
“If I had a hammer that seemed to me to work really well, but no one was willing to pay me the going rate for hammers of that quality”
.. then by definition you have mis-estimated the going rate.