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Elo comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Coincidence or Correlation?
A couple of months ago, I postponed an overnight camping trip due to a gut feeing. I still haven't taken that particular trip, having focused on other activities.
Today, my local newspaper is reporting that a body was found in that park this morning. My natural human instinct is to think "That could have been me!"... but, of course, instincts are less trustworthy than other forms of thinking.
What are the odds that I'm a low-probability-branch Everett Immortality survivor? Do you think I should pay measurably more attention to such gut feelings in the future? What lessons, if any, are able to be drawn from these circumstances?
This sounds like a case of confirmation bias. In that if your "gut feeling" was never confirmed as something, you probably wouldn't remember having the gut feeling. You could have been waiting every day for the rest of your life, and still not have gotten the gut-success feeling.
That doesn't help you recalibrate about it, but I wouldn't be listening to gut any more or less in the future.