Upvoted. The heuristic "uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory" is in the first place meant to be an heuristic against frequentist statistics. One can argue that probabilities are properties of the things itself also in situations of purely epistemic randomness. The argument "uncertainty exist in the map, not in the territory" is used in this context to show that thinking probablilities existing as "thing itself" can lead to weird conclusions.

If someone is interested about the book, i highly recommend the audiobook version. You can find it from: http://castify.co/channels/53

It took me 5 days to listen the whole book (volume 1-3).

Ok, lets say you are right that there does not exist perfect theoretical rationality in your hypothetical game context with all the assumptions that helps to keep the whole game standing. Nice. So what?

Speaking as someone who finds that placebos cure my headaches as well as painkillers do, I dispute that that is the question. When placebos work, they are a method of healing. Of course, you may not consider headaches to an illness, in which case I will not object, but will only point out that medicine does deal with headaches, so shifting that part of your caseload to a placebo dealer should help maximize your healing of sick people.

The article isn't so much about Reiki as about intentionally utilizing the placebo effect in medicine. And that there is some evidence that, for the group of people that currently believe (medicine x) is effective, the placebo effect of fake (medicine x) may be stronger than that of fake (medicine y) and (medicine x) has fewer medically significant side effects than (medicine y).

Hi. Just leaving a few comments about me and what I have been doing in terms of research people here will find interesting. I joined just a couple of days ago so I am not so sure about styles, this seems to be the proper place for a first post and I am guessing the format and contents are free.

While I was once a normal theoretical physicist, I was always interested in the questions of why we believe in some theories, I think that for a while I felt that we were not doing everything right. As I went through my professional life, I had to start interacting with people from different areas and that meant a need to learn Statistics. Oddly, I taught myself Bayesian methods before I even knew there was something called hypothesis tests.

Today, my research involves parts of Opinion Dynamics (I am still a theoretical physicist there, somehow), and I have been starting to make more and more use of results of human cognition experiments to understand a few things as well as a Bayesian framework to generate my models. I have also been doing some small amount of research in evolutionary models. But my real main interest in the moment can easily be seen in a paper that I just put online at the ArXiv preprint site. Indeed, while I already knew the site and found it interesting, time limits meant I never really planed to write anything here. So, the reason I actually joined the site now is because I think you will find the whole discussion in the paper quite interesting. I do think that my main conclusion there about human reasoning and its consequences is so obvious that it always amazes me how deep our instincts must be for it to have remained hidden.

There is a series of biases and effects that happen when we decide to support an idea. And those biases make us basically unable to change our minds or, in other words, to learn. In the paper I inspect the concept of choosing an idea to support from what we know about rationality. I conduct a small simulation experiment with different models that suggest that our desire to have one only idea is behind extremist points of view, and I finally discuss the consequences of it all for scientific practice. There is a book planned, with many more details and aimed at the layperson, the first draft version is complete, but it will still take a while before the book is out. The article is in drier prose, of course.

Anyway, while I am still submitting it for publication, the preprint is available at

http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05169

The name of the article is "Thou shalt not take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for changing how we believe", I do think you people here will have a lot of fun with it.

Best, André

Thanks for the post. I love it.

My comments:

First sidenote that dont assume that if something is a heuristic it is automatically a wrong way of thinking.(sorry if i misinterpret this, because you dont explicitly say this at all :) In some situations simple heuristics will outperform regression analysis for example.

But about your mainpoint. If I understood right this is actually a problem of violating so called "ratio rule".

(1) The degree to which c is representative of S is indicated by the conditional propability p (c | S)- that is, the propability of members of S have characterestic c.

(2) The propability that the characteristic c implies membership S is given by p (S | c). (Like you write)

(3) p (c | S) / p (S | c) = p(c) / p(S)

This is the Ratio Rule= Ratio of inverse propabilities equals the ratio of simple propabilities. So to equate these two propabilities p(c|S) and p(S|c) in the absence of equating ALSO the simple propabilitis is just wrong and bad thinking.

Representative thinking does not reflect these differences between p(c|S) and p(S|c) and introduces a symmetry in the map (thought) that does not exist in the world.

For example: "Home is the most dangerous place in the world because most accidents happen in home. So stay away from home!!!" --> This is confusion about the propability of accident given being home with propability being home given accident.

We were taught bayes in the form of predictive values, but this was pretty cursory. Challenging the medical professors' competence publicly isn't a smart move careerwise, unless they happen to be exceptionally rational and principled, unfortunately. There's a time to shut up and multiply, and a time to bend to the will of the elders :)

I have the Irish equivalent of an MD; "Medical Bachelor, Bachelor of Surgery, Bachelor of the Art of Obstetrics". This unwieldy degree puts me in fairly decent company on Less Wrong.

I may be generalizing from a sample of one, but my impression is that medicine selects out rationalists for the following reasons:

(1) The human body is an incompletely understood highly complex system; the consequences of manipulating any of the components can generally not be predicted from an understanding of the overall system. Medicine therefore necessarily has to rely heavily on memorization (at least until we get algorithms that take care of the memorization)

(2) A large component of successful practice of medicine is the ability to play the socially expected part of a doctor.

(3) From a financial perspective, medical school is a junk investment after you consider the opportunity costs. Consider the years in training, the number of hours worked, the high stakes and high pressure, the possibility of being sued etc. For mainstream society, this idea sounds almost contrarian, so rationalists may be more likely to recognize it.

--

My story may be relevant here: I was a middling medical student; I did well in those of the pre-clinical courses that did not rely too heavily on memorization, but barely scraped by in many of the clinical rotations. I never had any real passion for medicine, and this was certainly reflected in my performance.

When I worked as an intern physician, I realized that my map of the human body was insufficiently detailed to confidently make clinical decisions; I still wonder whether my classmates were better at absorbing knowledge that I had missed out on, or if they are just better at exuding confidence under uncertainty.

I now work in a very subspecialized area of medical research that is better aligned with rational thinking; I essentially try to apply modern ideas about causal inference to comparative effectiveness research and medical decision making. I was genuinely surprised to find that I could perform at the top level at Harvard, substantially outperforming people who were in a different league from me in terms of their performance in medical school. I am not sure whether this says something about the importance of being genuinely motivated, or if it is a matter of different cognitive personalities.

In retrospect, I am happy with where this path has taken me, but I can't help but wonder if there was a shorter path to get here. If I could talk to my 18-year old self, I certainly would have told him to stay far away from medicine.

Hello all!

Im a medical student and a researcher. My interests are consciousness, computational theory of mind, evolutionary psychology, and medical decision making. I bought Eliezers book and found here because of it.

Want to thank Eliezer for writing the book, best writing i have read this year. Thank You.