Overcoming Bias is a group blog on the systemic mistakes humans make, and how we can possibly correct them. The primary contributors are Robin Hanson of George Mason University and Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute. Common topics include "cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, microeconomics, applied statistics, social psychology, probability and decision theory, even a bit of Artificial Intelligence now and then."
Title | Author | Date | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
2006-11-20 | Description of OB and how to contribute. | ||
2006-11-20 | Should we teach children about self-interest explanations and sociobiology earlier? | ||
2006-11-21 | Discussion of Philip Tetlock's Fox/Hedgehog classification guide in Expert Political Judgement. | ||
2006-11-21 | Is there a bias towards working hard and against spending enough time with family? | ||
2006-11-21 | Biases may exist on an individual level, even if they cancel out on a group level, so even apparently contradictory bromides might highlight important types of failure. | ||
2006-11-22 | Some opinions are highly heritable, so put extra scrutiny on those beliefs. | ||
2006-11-22 | Rationality as martial art. Individuals should be able to train their mind like they train muscles. | ||
2006-11-23 | First known example of a market designed primarily to gain information from was created by Xanadu, Inc. in 1990. | ||
Robin Hanson | 2006-11-24 | Ratio of Democrats to Republicans in academia is 5:1 compared to roughly 1:1 in general populace. Is this due to intelligence and information, or social reasons? | |
2006-11-24 | Students admit to cheating, lying, and theft, but 75% think they are more ethical than their peers. | ||
2006-11-25 | "A bias is a non-rational factor that systematically pushes one's beliefs in some domain in one direction." | ||
2006-11-26 | According to Philip Tetlock, foxes (a flexible, tentative cognitive style) are more successful than at forecasting. Hedgehogs do worse than a random guess. | ||
2006-11-26 | Even though bias might have a broader technical meaning, it is better to think of it as "cheaply avoidable error". | ||
2006-11-26 | Paternalism to correct common biases and public choice considerations. | ||
2006-11-26 | We seek the truth for intellectual curiosity, pragmatic reasons, and for its own sake, although there is danger in thinking a moral duty to be rational exists. | ||