Want to alieve snakes are generally not dangerous?
No! Those things can kill you! Perhaps I am safe here in Berkeley for the next month or so but back home I expect most of the snakes I encounter to be capable of killing me if they bite me. They aren't particularly likely to bite me unless I touch them, corner them or stand on them - that's where the fear comes in handy. It makes me feel uncomfortable when walking through long grass, particularly when wearing light footwear. That way I at least pay attention to movements and sounds and so give the snake a chance to move out of the way before I run on him.
This example was intended as a possible alief you might want to hold, whether it is accurate to your beliefs or not. There are some people who can reasonably expect to never encounter a dangerous snake in the wild who are nonetheless very afraid of them (and all other snakes as well); while respect and fear for dangerous and potentially poisonous animals is worthwhile for some, for others it can be a handicap.
I should also mention (though I took this part out of the article) that there are some situations where one might want to alieve things entirely co...
During the sessions at the 2011 rationality minicamp, we learned that some of our biases can be used constructively, rather than just tolerated and avoided.
For example, in an excellent article discussing intuitions and the way they are formed, psychologist Robin Hogarth recommends that "if people want to shape their intuitions, [they should] make conscious efforts to inhabit environments that expose them to the experiences and information that form the intuitions that they want."
Another example: Carl Shulman remarked that due to the availability heuristic we anticipate car crashes with frequencies determined by how many people we know of or have heard about who have gotten into one. So if you don't fear car crashes but you want to acquire a more accurate level of concern about driving, you could seek out news or footage of car crashes. Video footage may work best, because experiential data unconsciously inform our intuitions more effectively than, say, written data.
This fact may lie behind many effective strategies for getting your brain to do what you want it to do:
In The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist we see a someone whose stated beliefs don't match their anticipations. Now we can actually use the brain's machinery to get it to do what we want it to: alieve that ghosts aren't real or dangerous. One method would be for our ghost stricken friend to get people to tell her detailed stories about pleasant nights they spent in haunted houses (complete with spooky details) where nothing bad happened. Alternatively, she could read some books or watch some videos with similar content. Best of all would be if she spent a month living in a 'haunted' house, perhaps after doing some of the other things to soothe her nerves. There are many who will attest that eventually one 'gets used to' the scary noises and frightening atmosphere of an old house, and ceases to be scared when sleeping in similar houses.
I attribute the effectiveness of these tactics mostly to successful persuasion of the non-conscious brain using experiential data.
So, it seems we have a (potentially very powerful) new technique to add to our rationalist arsenal. To summarize:
Examples:
It can be annoying when our unconsciously moderated aliefs don't match our rationality-influenced beliefs, but luckily our aliefs can be trained.
1 Thanks to Hugh Ristik for talking about this at minicamp.
2 Credit for this example goes to Brandon Reinhart.
Special thanks to Luke for all the help