Do you agree with the rest of what he has to say in that thread when he claims that "bad pseudo-scientific research designed to prove that people are biased idiots. Do you agree with him that there is a deliberate "agenda" within the cognitive bias research "which has a low opinion of humans" which is "treating humans like dirt, like idiots"?
I don't know if there is a deliberate agenda and I wouldn't have stated things so baldly (and that might just be a hangup on my part). Let's look at the Tversky and Kahneman paper that curi cited. The first sentence says:
Uncertainty is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
So in the very first sentence, the authors' have revealed a low opinion of humans. They think humans have a condition, although they don't explain what it is, only that uncertainty is part of it.
Later in the paper, they say:
Our studies of inductive reasoning have focused on systematic errors because they are diagnostic of the heuristics that generally govern inference and judgement.
So inference and judgement are governed by heuristics, genetic in origin (though this is just implied and the authors do nothing to address it). It's not that humans come up with explanations and solve problems, it's not that we are universal knowledge creators, it's that we use heuristics handed down to us from our genes and we must be alerted to biases in them in order to correct them, otherwise we make systematic errors. So, again, a low opinion of humans. And we don't do induction - as Popper and others such as Deutsch have explained, induction is impossible, it's not a way we reason.
curi noted the authors also say:
Our problems, of course, were constructed to elicit conjunction errors, and they do not provide an unbiased estimate of the prevalence of these errors.
So they admit bias.
Do you agree with his claim that the conjunction fallacy is a claim about all thought about conjunctions and not some conjunctions?
Yes. It is based on inductivist assumptions about how people think, as the quote above illustrates. They disregard the importance of explanations and they think humans do probabilistic reasoning using in-born heuristics and that these are universal.
Do you agree with his claim that ""Probability estimate" is a technical term which we can't expect people to know? Do you agree with his implicit claim that this should apply even to highly educated people who work as foreign policy experts?
Do you think foreign policy experts use probabilities rather than explanations?
Uncertainty is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.
So in the very first sentence, the authors' have revealed a low opinion of humans. They think humans have a condition, although they don't explain what it is, only that uncertainty is part of it.
Um, I think you are possibly taking a poetic remark too seriously. If they had said "uncertainty is part of everyday life" would you have objected?
...So inference and judgement are governed by heuristics, genetic in origin (though this is just implied and the authors do nothing to address i
In several places in the sequences, Eliezer writes condescendingly about "Traditional Rationality". The impression given is that Traditional Rationality was OK in its day, but that today we have better varieties of rationality available.
That is fine, except that it is unclear to me just what the traditional kind of rationality included, and it is also unclear just what it failed to include. In one essay, Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with winning. In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes). Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).
In this essay, Eliezer laments that being a traditional rationalist was not enough to keep him from devising a Mysterious Answer to a mysterious question. That puzzles me because I would have thought that traditional ideas from Peirce, Popper, and Korzybski would have been sufficient to avoid that error. So apparently I fail to understand either what a Mysterious Answer is or just how weak the traditional form of rationality actually is.
Can anyone help to clarify this? By "Traditional Rationality", does Eliezer mean to designate a particular collection of ideas, or does he use it more loosely to indicate any thinking that is not quite up to his level?