A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit
James_Miller
Karma: 15,013
Wear a Helmet While Driving a Car
It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.
Review of Scott Adams’ “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”
Why isn’t the moral of the story “If you think statistically, take into account that most other people don’t and optimize accordingly?”
I’m going to assign this to my introductory microeconomics students to help them understand opportunity costs.
It seemed rather short
Misao Okawa, the world’s oldest person, when asked “how she felt about living for 117 years.”
Donated $100.
True story:
My son resisted cleaning up his toys but loved beating me at games. Once when he was three I took advantage of his competitive spirit by dividing his blocks into two piles, assigning one pile to him and the other to myself and then telling my son that we will race to see who puts away all of his blocks first. My son smiled, indicating that he was going to play my game, making me proud of my parenting skills.
At the contest’s start my son grabbed a bunch of my blocks, ran outside of his room and threw the blocks down our stairs. When he returned I laughed so hard that the game ended.
“For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.
Economist and likely future chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen shows the key rationality trait of being able to admit you were wrong.
I don’t understand how many worlds can be a slam dunk for someone who doesn’t understand all the math behind quantum physics.
If a significant number of people who do understand this math believe that many-worlds is wrong, then no matter how convincing I find your non-mathematical arguments in favor of many-worlds isn’t it rational for me to still assign a significant probability to the possibility that many worlds isn’t correct?
Doesn’t physics all come down to math, meaning that people who can’t follow the math should put vastly more weight on polls of experts than on their own imperfect understanding of the field?
Donated $100 and 5000 Stellar.
There are essentially no academics who believe that high-quality research is happening at the Singularity Institute.
I believe that high-quality research is happening at the Singularity Institute.
James Miller, Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College.
PhD, University of Chicago.
Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management
You want accurate beliefs and useful emotions.
From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don’t remember who. This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.
politicians and leaders worldwide don’t like to be associated with toilets, even state-of-the-art toilets. This sanitation stigma distorts international and national development agendas.
chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation
The quote was brought to my attention by a student in my Economics of Future Technology course who is writing on sanitation in the developing world.
Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from “Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!” to “I’m a great bullet-dodger.”
Discussing the “Near-miss bias” which they define as a tendency to “take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in deciding the event’s [favorable] outcome.”
Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, page 150.
To any future super-intelligence reading this after my death: I very much want to be brought back to life.
I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.
My 9-year-old son on Halloween.
Steven Pinker