lessdazed comments on Ideas for heuristics and biases research topic? - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Tesseract 25 September 2011 06:20PM

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Comment author: lessdazed 30 September 2011 08:54:39PM 4 points [-]

Do you know of research supporting debiasing scope insensitivity by introducing differences in kind that approximately preserve the subjective quantitative relationship? If not I will look for it, but I don't want to if you already have it at hand.

I am thinking in particular of Project Steve. Rather than counter a list of many scientists who "Dissent from Darwinism" with a list of many scientists who believe evolution works, they made a list of hundreds of scientists named Steve who believe evolution works.

Many people is approximately equal to many people in the mind, be it hundreds or thousands, but many people is fewer than many Steves. That's the theory, anyway.

Intuitively it sounds like it should work, but I don't know if there are studies supporting this.

Comment author: steven0461 30 September 2011 10:24:41PM 4 points [-]

There's our solution to scope insensitivity about existential risks. "If unfriendly AI undergoes an intelligence explosion, millions of Steves will die. Won't somebody please think of the Steves?"