Confirmation bias is the biggest obstacle to Rationality, and often the least understood. We need to rethink it through the lens of brains evolved in bodies and made for action, not argument.
Category: rationality
Review of the LessWrong 2018 essay collection on epistemology, from how it smells to what it says about the state of the Rationality community in 2020.
Rationalists did amazingly well with COVID. Will this inspire everyone else to embrace rationality? I see a few obstacles on the way.
Coronavirus revealed a great crisis of sensemaking, which means it has also created a great opportunity.
Information on the coronavirus is widely available, and it doesn't look positive. So why is everyone waiting for permission to do something about it?
It's obvious to some people that Rationality can improve your life, and equally obvious to others that it won't - the latter group includes Daniel Kahneman and Scott Alexander. Who's right? And how would we know?
Are Rationalists just a polyamory community? And if not, what explains the connection between the two? I dig deep into the data, and reach some unexpected conclusions.
A cool superpower to have would be the ability to slow subjective time and get a lot of thinking done. In every superhero movie, no matter how fast the protagonists fly or how hard they punch, they always end up within one step of disaster because their planning skills are dogshit. The villain loses not … Continue reading Thinking Fast and Hard
Monty Hall isn't just a curious probability puzzle. It's a widely applicable demonstration of Bayesian thinking and rationality.
Should we believe what is useful to believe over what it true? I attack this question from various angles: wrong "wrongness", murder-Gandhiism, the Gorilla Channel, and fake glasses.
Should I keep trying one diet after another or just accept my figure as it is? I let the voices in my head hash it out.
Should secular liberals try to get in the head of a conservative philosopher of religion? Yes, if it's all in the pursuit of truth.
Is rationality a religion? If so, it's a really crappy one.
For the hardest choices we make in life, our gut is not enough. We also need a chart with numbers in it.
What makes people who hold an extreme opinion think that they represent the majority?
"Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest." - Adam Smith
Today isn't strange, it's how the world is. It didn't become that way today, we just found out now. So let's deal with this.
Welcome to day 14 of Putanumonit's birthday week celebration! It's time to wrap up the year-in-review and get ready for a couple of serious writing projects. In Zero Agents and Plastic Men I tried to conjure up some new jargon, and it turned out kind of lame and confusing. My buddy Ryan and I came … Continue reading Year 1 Redux – Friends and Rationalists
When economics became impersonal, humanity rose from ragged tribes to a prosperous civilization. It's time for a similar revolution in our morals.
Can you judge what people believe in based on the tribes they belong to? What if they explicitly tell you? And what does this have to do with the fact that only 2% of blacks support Trump?
