People go funny in the head when talking about politics.  The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring:  In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death.  And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation...  When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed.  Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it.  If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution.  Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational.

Kaj Sotala asked:

I was wondering, is there an avenue for us non-contributor readers to raise questions we think would be interesting to discuss?

If you have a suggested Overcoming Bias topic you'd like to see discussed, post it in a comment here.  But please don't actually discuss the topic with further comments, just give us the suggestion.  This post is for topic suggestions, not topic discussions.

Yesterday being my 100th Overcoming Bias post, it seems an opportune time to answer a commenter's question:  Why am I posting?

For a long time I've suffered from writer's molasses.  Like writer's block, only instead of not writing, I write very slooowly. At least when it comes to writing Documents - papers, book chapters, website material.  If I haven't published a hundred papers, it's not for lack of a hundred ideas, but because writing one paper - at my current pace - takes four months full time.  I sometimes wonder if I could become a respectable academic if I wrote at a respectable pace.

Oddly enough, I can write most emails around as fast as I type. Such disorders are hard to self-diagnose, but I suspect that part of the problem is that on Documents I repeatedly reread and tweak material I've already written, instead of writing new material.  James Hogan (an SF author) once told me that he was more productive on a typewriter than a word processor, because the typewriter prevented him from tweaking until the second draft.

A blook is a collection of blog posts that have been edited into a book.  Logically, then, publishing a book as a series of blog posts ought to be known as "blooking".

From this month's Open Thread, Stirling Westrup asks:

There is much mention in this blog about Bayesian rationality, or the use of Bayes' methods in decision making. Now, I studied Bayes conditional probabilities in Statistics class in University many years ago, but my knowledge of the theory ends there. Can you recommend any good books on the subject?

In fact, do you folks have a recommended reading list (other than this blog, of course!) for those trying to identify and overcome their own biases?

Robin Hanson has his fellow GMU economists to talk to, but I'm not associated with a university and I live way out in the boondocks: the echoing emptiness of, er, Silicon Valley.

Overcoming Bias gets over 2000 visitors per day.  Surely some of you are from the Bay Area.  Would you be interested in a Bay Area meetup of Overcoming Bias readers?

Polls after the jump.
If you're interested at all, please vote in at least the closest-city poll.
Polls will be processed for a best-compromise value, not a binding modal result.
If I get at least 30 responses, I'll start looking into meetup locations.

Followup to: Most of my posts over the last month...

Every now and then, you run across someone who has discovered the One Great Moral Principle, of which all other values are a mere derivative consequence.

I run across more of these people than you do.  Only in my case, it's people who know the amazingly simple utility function that is all you need to program into an artificial superintelligence and then everything will turn out fine...

It's incredible how one little issue can require so much prerequisite material.  My original schedule called for "Fake Utility Functions" to follow "Fake Justification" on Oct 31.

Talk about your planning fallacy.  I've been planning to post on this topic in "just a few days" for the past month.  A fun little demonstration of underestimated inferential distances.

You see, before I wrote this post, it occurred to me that if I wanted to properly explain the problem of fake utility functions, it would be helpful to illustrate a mistake about what a simple optimization criterion implied.  The strongest real-world example I knew was the Tragedy of Group Selectionism.  At first I thought I'd mention it in passing, within "Fake Utility Functions", but I decided the Tragedy of Group Selectionism was a long enough story that it needed its own blog post...

Overcoming Bias now has a new Welcome page, as I'm sure you've noticed on the sidebar.  A completely ad-hoc eyeballing "statistical" test during our recent Redditing showed that a less prominent placement didn't increase pageviews per visit.  Hopefully it won't get in the way too much.

Handy social bookmarking thingy is just below "Recent Posts".

The "Contributors" section now contains only individuals who have made 3 or more Overcoming Bias posts.  For the curious, the following is the complete list of individuals who've made 10 or more contributions:  Stuart Armstrong, David Balan, Nick Bostrom, Hal Finney, Robin Hanson, Andrew Gelman, James Miller, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Many of us, including me, have been having trouble with a odd Typekey bug that shows us as logged in, but marks our contributions as having come from nowhere.  If you "Sign out", manually enter your name and email address (and optionally URL), hit "Remember personal info", and then post, you shouldn't have this problem.  At least it's worked for me, so far.

Yesterday, "Overcoming Cryonics" wrote:

Eliezer, enough with your nonsense about cryonicism, life-extensionism, trans-humanism, and the singularity.  These things have nothing to do with overcoming bias... if you're going to enforce the comments policy then you should also self-enforce the overcoming bias posting policy instead of using posts to blithely proselytize your cryonicism / life-extensionism / trans-humanism / singularity religion.

One, there is nothing in the Overcoming Bias posting policy against transhumanism.

Two, as a matter of fact, I do try to avoid proselytizing here.  I have other forums in which to vent my thoughts on transhumanism.  When I write a blog post proselytizing transhumanism, it looks like this, this, or this.

But it's hard for me to avoid all references to transhumanism.  "Overcoming Cryonics" commented to a post in which there was exactly one reference to a transhumanist topic.  I had said:

The first time I gave a presentation - the first time I ever climbed onto a stage in front of a couple of hundred people to talk about the Singularity - I briefly thought to myself:  "I bet most people would be experiencing 'stage fright' about now.  But that wouldn't be helpful, so I'm not going to go there.

What, exactly, am I supposed to do about that?  The first time I ever got up on stage, I was in fact talking about the Singularity!  That's the actual history!  Transhumanism is not a hobby for me, it's my paid day job as a Research Fellow of the Singularity Institute.  Asking me to avoid all mentions of transhumanism is like asking Robin Hanson to avoid all mentions of academia.

Politics, ah, politics!  If human insanities could physically manifest as lumps of putrefaction, and the dripping slimes collected into a giant festering pit, and the mound of corruption formed itself into a monster and shambled forth to eat brains...

Ordinarily I prefer to discuss politics indirectly, rather than directly.  Politics varies from government to government.  Better to talk about human universals - cognitive biases that can be nailed down and examined in the laboratory - malfunctions of sanity that appear wherever humans go.  Then it's up to you to apply the knowledge to your own political situation.

This policy also avoids offending people, so I tend to suspect my clever-sounding rationale for following it.

Over the next two weeks, Iowa and New Hampshire will exercise their Constitutional right to appoint the next President of the United States.  I hope you will forgive me if I am, briefly, relevant.

I intend to do a series of three posts directly applying to politics.  Don't worry, after that it's back to the safe refuge of cognitive science.

Rest assured that I don't plan on endorsing a party, let alone a candidate.

If I say something that you disagree with, remember that my attempts at rationality are not sourced from a divine scripture, and hence are not a package deal. You read plenty of other blogs, I hope, where an author occasionally says something you dislike, from time to time?

The Overcoming Bias meetup has been scheduled for Thursday, February 21st, at 7pm.  We're going to look at locating this in Millbrae within walking distance of the BART / Caltrain station.  The particular restaurant I had in mind turns out to be booked for Thursdays, so if you know a good Millbrae restaurant (with a private room?) in walking distance of the train station, please post in the comments.  I'll be looking at restaurants shortly.

Why not schedule to a day other than Thursday, you ask?

Because:

Robin Hanson will be in the Bay Area and attending!  Woohoo!

If you would be able to make Thursday the 21st, 7pm, in Millbrae, somewhere near the BART/Caltrain, please vote below.  No, seriously, please vote, now - the kind of restaurant I have to find depends on how many people will be attending.