I had to read this many times for it to really sink in, so I'm going to try performing an ideological Turing test just to make sure that I'm on the same page as you (I assume that term applies to what I'm about to do even though the examples in that post had to do with political and theological arguments):
Our purpose, both in performing the experiment and educating people about cognitive biases, is to demonstrate that people can misinterpret reality. To make a distinction between the purposes of the two forms of demonstration -- besides being a useless exercise in this context because it doesn't allow us to anticipate experiences that we would not be able to anticipate without the distinction -- is to mislead the subject into thinking that our purpose in demonstrating illusions is not the same as our purpose in demonstrating biases. Even though we are making a specious distinction, to not make it would be worse because the subject would focus on both our and their social status rather than the argument, and therefore never learn enough to be able to understand that the distinction is specious. Because we (read: all of you and not me) already know that the distinction is specious, there is no reason to make the distinction here.
Once you let me know if I've paraphrased your explanation correctly, I'll edit the OP accordingly.
On the bit about the concluding remarks:
I don't understand what you mean when you say "(albeit in "()" (brackets, that is))." Do you mean that these sorts of end notes are usually enclosed in brackets rather than parentheses and it's a bit confusing because I've used so many parentheses throughout the entire post?
Also, I wasn't sure where else I could say the things that I said at the end of this post, and I didn't think that things like that would really matter in discussion, only on main. I always assumed that I would eventually remove them. I do think that I needed to say those things, especially because I'm pretty lost here having not yet read the sequences and being inexperienced; I don't know what tags are appropriate, I don't know how what I've written relates to the content in the sequences and other posts, I don't explicitly understand the purpose of all of the religious references and therefore how appropriate the title is, etc. Maybe you're specifically referring to formatting? Is there a way that I could format the notes to make them less obtrusive? As for the part specifically to Eliezer, when I wrote this, I considered what I'm proposing as a possible solution to the problem of, to use some of his words, "generalizing the initiation of the transition." So even though I can see how it seems unrelated, I think that if I had included the message to him in the rationalist origin story thread then he wouldn't understand the full context of why I came to that conclusion. On the other hand, I could have put what I said in this post in my comment on that thread, but it seems to me that this subject is deserving of its own post. From my perspective at the time, what I had to say in this post and what I had to say specifically to Eliezer were inextricable, so I put it here. Now I'm thinking maybe I could put the message at the end of my comment in that thread and just include a link saying "Read this first!" Does that clarify the message's purpose? Tell me what you think about all of that.
Also, when I edit the post, since this is in discussion, should I include notes on what I've changed?
Yes; your paraphrasing about covers it. Nicely done, if I may say so. Let me reemphasize that it was a minor point overall, but still one I thought worth mentioning (in passing), if only in a half-sentence.
I meant to say parentheses and just confused them with brackets (not a native speaker, or writer, for that matter). The point only being that a post in a "meta content - subject level content - meta content" format which sandwiches your important content in between meta remarks loses some of its saliency, parentheses or no.
You are doing fine, a...
It seems that the CFAR workshops so far have been dedicated to people who have preconceptions pretty close in ideaspace to the sorts of ideas proposed on LW and by the institutions related to it. This is not a criticism; it's easier to start out this way: as has been said, in a different context and perhaps not in so many words, we should focus on precision before tractability. We're not going to learn a thing about the effectiveness of rationality training from people who won't even listen to what we have to say. Nevertheless, there will come a day when these efforts must be expanded to people who don't already view us as high in social status, so we still have to solve the problem of people being more concerned with both our and their social status than with listening to what we have to say. I propose that the solution is to divorce the consideration of social status from the argument.
There is a lot of talk of cognitive biases on LW, and for good reason, but ultimately what we are trying to teach people is that they are prone to misinterpreting reality, and cognitive biases are only one component of this. One of the problems with trying to teach people about biases is that people feel personally responsible for being biased; many people have a conception of thinking as an 'active' process, so they feel as though it reflects upon their character. On the other hand, many people conceive of perception as a 'passive' process; no one feels personally responsible for what they perceive. So, I propose that we circumvent this fear of character assassination by demonstrating how people can misinterpret reality through perception. Enter: the rubber hand illusion.
In case you're unfamiliar with this illusion, to demonstrate the rubber hand illusion, a subject sits at a table, a rubber hand is placed in front of them, oriented relative to their body as a natural hand would be, and a partition is placed between the rubber hand and their 'real' hand such that they are unable to see the 'real' hand. Then, the experimenter simultaneously 'stimulates' both hands at random intervals (usually by stroking each hand with a paintbrush). Then, the experimenter overextends the tips of a finger on each hand, the rubber hand about 90 degrees, and the 'real' hand about 20 degrees (it's not really overextension, and it wouldn't cause pain outside of the experiment's conditions). Measurements of skin conductance response indicate that subjects anticipate pain when this is done, and a very small selection of subjects even report actually experiencing pain. Also, (just for kicks) when subjects are questioned about the degree to which they believe their 'real' finger was bent, they overestimate, by an average of about 20 degrees.
As Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran has demonstrated, the rubber hand illusion isn't the most general example of this sort of illusion: the human mind can even anticipate pain from injury to the surface of a table. In fact, there is evidence that the human mind's evaluation of what is and is not part of its body isn't even dependent upon distance: Dr. Ramachandran has also demonstrated this with rubber hands attached to unnaturally long rubber arms.
I think that there are also three beneficial side effects to this exercise. (1) We are trying to convince people that Bayesian inference is a useful way to form beliefs, and this illusion demonstrates that every human mind already unconsciously uses Bayesian inference all of the time (namely, to infer what is and isn't its body). To further demonstrate the part about Bayesian inference, I would suggest that subjects also subsequently be shown how the illusion does not occur when the rubber hand is perpendicular to the 'real' hand or when the 'stimulations' aren't simultaneous. (2) After the fact, the demonstration grants social status to the demonstrator in the eyes of the subject: "This person showed me something that I consider extremely significant and that I didn't know about, therefore, they must be important." (3) Inconsistencies in perception instill feelings of self-doubt and incredulity, which makes it easier to change one's mind.
Addendum: This post has been substantially edited, both for brevity and on the basis of mistakes mentioned in the comments, such that some of the comments now appear nonsensical. Here is a draft that I found on my desktop which as far as I can tell is identical to the original post: http://pastebin.com/BL81VQVp