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SforSingularity comments on Misleading the witness - Less Wrong
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Most "rationalists" are quite smart people, so tricks that are designed by a trickster to fool the masses rarely work on us. For example, I doubt that many on this site would invest heavily in a pyramid scheme or get fooled by a used car salesman. This is because these tricks are targeted at the average idiot.
However, I have recently noticed that there is, for each of us, a stalker who stalks us and at each and every turn attempts to deceive us, and is just as smart as we are. That stalker/trickster is your own cognitive biases, and by far and away inflicts the greatest material losses on you. This is certainly true in my case.
I cannot even remember the last time I was fooled by someone else, but now that I am working on reducing my losses due to self deception, I realize that basically every day I engage in successful self-deception: I get into some emotional state, myopic, irrational algorithms take over, and I make up little excuses to myself for why they reached the right conclusion.
The real enemy is already inside your head.
Wrong. Tricksters rely on people making stupid assumptions and failing to check assertions. People with a lot of brainpower can do those things just as easily as people without.
Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do very poorly, yet they are clearly very brainy. It takes more than just brains to be intelligent - you have to use the brains properly.
If I had a dollar for every brainy person who'd been gulled because they thought they were "too smart" to require being skeptical...
Reference, please. I defy the implied claim that "Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do worse than the average person". I bet 6:1 against this.
and if I had a dollar for every average idiot who sleepwalked straight into an obvious scam I would make a lot more money.
Project Alpha by James Randi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha
Scientists tend to be trusting and naive, since neither nature nor their peers are prone to lying. That's why magicians make such great skeptics -- their profession is nothing but lying!
Those sets are not disjoint.
I define "average idiot" to be disjoint from "brainy person". Does that sound reasonable?
Of course, I am sure that there are some very clever people who sleepwalked straight into a really obvious scam without even questioning it, but I am making the empirical claim that this doesn't happen as much as it does for people of below average intelligence.