From London, now living in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Paul Crowley
Karma: 15,169
Hard to pick a favourite, of course, but there’s a warning against confirmation bias that cautions us against standing firm, to move with the evidence like grass in the wind, that has stuck with me.
On the general discussions of what sort of book I want, I want one no more than a couple of hundred pages long which I can press into the hands of as many of my friends as possible. One that speaks as straightforwardly as possible, without all the self-aggrandizing eastern-guru type language...
What you say doesn’t account for the curious absence of any direct affirmation of her belief—it’s weird that she’s always at one remove from her own belief.
There is evidence that placebos work even if you know that they contain no active ingredients, so we may be spared this interesting dilemma!
I’ve tried to combat this one by imagining the item at a variety of different price points, with the same saving. I don’t know how you’d measure how much success you were having, though, because obviously no-one who understood this bias would exhibit it in a formal test setting, only in more informal settings where it’s harder to compare. You need some way of mixing it up so you can’t just do the sum, but the bias emerges from the noise all the same.
I had a partner once who described a habit of having imaginary arguments with people, finding herself angry with them for the things she had imagined them saying, and having to catch herself and remember that they didn’t really say those things. It made me think that there must be many less self-aware than her who don’t catch themselves in that situation.
Heh, we did at one point have at least one Christian reader, but they deconverted, at least in part due to what they read here. Weirdly, they still seem to treat Christianity as a proper idea worth taking seriously, but I guess cognitive dissonance takes time to wear off.
(if you’re reading—hello!)
Wouldn’t squirting cold water in the left ear of creationists (or other healthy subjects who are having trouble letting go of a belief) be an effective test of Dr Ramachandran’s hypothesis? And, potentially, a genuinely useful rationality technique?
I’m now imagining sneaking up on some stubbornly irrational people in my own life, water pistol in hand...
Memes are at best a thought-provoking analogy—we have no way of being rigorous about them. I’d love to be wrong about this, but I’d be surprised.
It means that if I talk about memes, I leave myself open to an easy challenge to which I currently have no reply. I’d really like a good reply, since I think it’s a genuinely useful aid to thinking about what it means for an idea to be popular, so if you have one I’m keen to hear it!
What subject did you use as a test? I used my non-dominant hand to type this and the only difference is that it took much longer!
I increasingly think that for rationalists to use religion as their intellectual sparring partner is a form of laziness. I could barely be more confident than I am that religion is a load of bunkum, and so when I engage with it I know I am vastly better armed and virtually guaranteed victory, at least in my own eyes. This makes it very attractive to spar with as far as my ego is concerned, with almost a zero chance of discovering my own mistakes or the flaws in my own rationality. Religion really could not do more to flag itself as mistaken from a rational point of view—we should move on and start taking on harder targets.
I take this argument seriously—in fact, I’ve been discussing it in my own journal and that of some friends recently. I’ve yet to hear a good counterargument, so I look forward to hearing yours.
The practical answer is that most people would indeed put their neck in the noose for those other 10 strangers, because they and they alone can save them. However, if the King were instead to go out onto the marketplace and say “I will hang ten people today unless one person steps up to take their place”, no-one would volunteer. This makes little sense from a consequentialist point of view; it’s just a fact about human psychology.
One consequence is that if you’re ever being attacked on the street while passers by walk on, don’t just shout for help: select a particular passer by and ask them for help as specifically as you can.
If you were to try this, you would instead be irrational in a consistent way described by well-known cognitive biases, and therefore unusually easy to manipulate.
BTW your edit is a spoiler—I recommend turning it into a comment...
I suspect that would be counterproductive—people would rather hang onto the idea that someone else is being targeted.
You think that if most people in privileged countries suddenly made maximising the total worldwide good their true goal in life, it would be a bad thing? I’d like to believe this to justify my own small extravagances, but I doubt it.
Link propagation is fine but your lead-in should tell us why we lesswrong readers ant to clock on the link; this doesn’t provide nearly enough information.
That the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics; it’s not discussed here because politics is the mind-killer, but it is also indispensible.
On a more specific political note, that there are plenty of things government can do better than the market, and where government fails the people the correct approach is often not dispensing with government but attempting to improve government by improving democracy.
I know that both of these, especially this last, go against what many here believe, and I don’t intend to get into a detailed defence of it here—it’s not exactly a fresh topic of debate, and it’s not in line with the mission for this site.
I can find no way to link to my home page (or provide any other information on who I am) from my visible user profile.