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atucker comments on Open Thread, April 2011 - Less Wrong
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I was thinking of starting a sequence of articles summarizing Heuristics and Biases by Kahneman and Tversky for people who don't want to buy or read the book.
I bought it, and it seems like something like this would help make me actually stick through reading it long enough to make me finish it. And make it more memorable.
Would people want that?
Edit: I guess the answer is Yes. I should make time for this.
I had this idea just before I fell asleep last night:
Completely reorganize and re-word the biases. Even the word "bias" could be changed to something less threatening... like "brain fart." Remove their names and group them according to category headings like "Silly things people do without realizing it." Then a numbered list (almost like commandments! eek!) under each category. Each bias is then condensed to no more than two sentences. In language that would shame the writer of a For Dummies book. For credibility, put a hyperlink to "The Science-y Stuff" at the end of each, that can go to the "official" name, with research papers, et al.
I'm open to being lambasted about this suggestion, but I personally think it'd do more good than harm.
Wikipedia has the "Simple English" version, maybe there could be a similar parallel version of the LessWrong wiki? Although I find reading the Simple English Wikipedia a rather mind-numbing experience.
Yeah, I remain unconvinced that my resistance to reading the Sequences and the existing biases articles isn't just garden-variety fear of feeling dumb.
Are you familar with youarenotsosmart.com? It might be more what you're looking for.
Thanks, yeah, I'm familiar. There isn't much on there, though.
It would be fun, but I'm not sure how memorable it would be. Maybe do them as jokes?
Couldn't hurt to do as a recap though.
What are the criteria for memorable?
Like, weighty and burned into my brain in a way that makes it a part of my natural reaction to things.
I guess if they were short enough to memorize the list though, I could just memorize it and go through it when I was worried about a bias.
Do you associate "weighty" with difficult language? I realize "difficult" is subjective.
No, but I associate it with length.
Like, I'm normally more affected by novels than blog posts.
I like to read, but I have a woefully short attention span. I guess what I'm saying is: the biases are valuable information, but the language they're written in, at least on wikipedia, is difficult for the layman. I would prefer my experience of gaining knowledge to not be (what I consider) unnecessarily difficult. I think the majority of people who might benefit from knowing about the biases won't slog through them until they're written in For Dummies language.
This is not to say that I refuse to Do My Work. I just bristle at doing work that seems unnecessary.
Please do this.
By all means :-) Links to relevant Sequences articles should be achievable as well.
Yeah. I intend to use existing material whenever appropriate.
IIRC, there are quite a few articles on specific cognitive biases floating around here already, they're just not well indexed.
You may find this site interesting as well.
Thanks, this is really helpful.
EDIT: Would it make sense to just try and get this guy to post on LW himself?
Have we ever tried to do that before?