How To Actually Change Your Mind

How to Actually Change Your Mind is the second book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is the edited version of a series of blog posts in "the Sequences", and covers the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality: triumphing over confirmation bias and motivated cognition.

How to Actually Change Your Mind contains seven sequences of essays. These are all collected in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies ebook, but the essay names below are also linked to the original blog posts.

F. Politics and Rationality

57. Politics is the Mind-Killer

58. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

59. The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality

60. Correspondence Bias

61. Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

62. Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence

63. Argument Screens Off Authority

64. Hug the Query

65. Rationality and the English Language

66. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor

Most important posts:

• The Affect Heuristic
• The Halo Effect
• Affective Death Spirals
• Resist the Happy Death Spiral
• Uncritical Supercriticality

Seeing with Fresh Eyes

• Anchoring and Adjustment
• Priming and Contamination
• Do We Believe Everything We're Told?
• Cached Thoughts
• The 'Outside the Box' Box
• Original Seeing
• The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
• How to Seem (and Be) Deep
• We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
• Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
• On Expressing Your Concerns
• The Genetic Fallacy

Noticing Confusion

(Heavy overlap with Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.)

• Your Strength as a Rationalist
• Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
• Hindsight Bias
• Hindsight Devalues Science
• Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark

Against Rationalization

• Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
• Update Yourself Incrementally
• One Argument Against An Army
• The Bottom Line
• What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
• Rationalization
• A Rational Argument
• Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
• Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation
  • A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
• Fake Justification
• Fake Optimization Criteria
• Is That Your True Rejection?
• Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
  • Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
• Anti-Epistemology
  • The Sacred Mundane

Against Doublethink

• Singlethink
• Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased
• No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
• Belief in Self-Deception
• Moore's Paradox
• Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive

Overly Convenient Excuses

• The Proper Use of Humility
• The Third Alternative
• Privileging the Hypothesis (and its requisites, like Locating the hypothesis)
• But There's Still A Chance, Right?
  • The Fallacy of Gray
  • Absolute Authority
  • How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
  • Infinite Certainty
  • 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

Letting Go

• Feeling Rational
• The Importance of Saying "Oops"
  • The Crackpot Offer
  • Just Lose Hope Already
• The Proper Use of Doubt
• You Can Face Reality
• The Meditation on Curiosity
• Something to Protect
• No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
• Leave a Line of Retreat
• Crisis of Faith
  • The Ritual (short story)

See also

• Locating the hypothesis and Privileging the hypothesis
• Litany of Gendlin and Litany of Tarski

Alternative formats

• Podcast: http://castify.co/channels/46-how-to-actually-change-your-mind
• ReadLists: http://readlists.com/298c2361