Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Singlethink - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2007 07:24PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (24)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 October 2007 02:28:43PM 2 points [-]

RI, the problem was simply the size of the planet and its scientific literature. I just didn't run into the field of heuristics and biases until that late. I realized it was important the first time I read a mention-in-passing on a webpage - though I didn't realize how much there was to know and how little of it I knew; Emil Gilliam finally mailed me a copy of "Judgment Under Uncertainty".

At the age of fifteen, I realized the importance of defeating biases in general, I just didn't know there was a field that studied them. I knew the importance of rationality in general, but I'd never heard the word "Bayesian". It's a frighteningly big world out there - not like a hunter-gatherer tribe, where you can presume you know everything anyone else knows.