I've always been annoyed by the term "risk-free bonds rate", meaning the return on US Treasury bills.  Just because US bonds have not defaulted within their trading experience, people assume this is impossible?  A list of major governments in 1900 would probably put the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary well ahead of the relatively young United States.  Citing the good track record of the US alone, and not all governments of equal apparent stability at the start of the same time period, is purest survivorship bias.

The United States is a democracy; if enough people vote for representatives who decide not to pay off the bonds, they won't get paid.  Do you want to look at recent history, let alone ancient history, and tell me this is impossible?  The Internet could enable coordinated populist voting that would sweep new candidates into office, in defiance of prevous political machines.  Then the US economy melts under the burden of consumer debt, which causes China to stop buying US bonds and dump its dollar reserves.  Then Al Qaeda finally smuggles a nuke into Washington, D.C.  Then the next global pandemic hits.  And these are just "good stories" - the probability of the US defaulting on its bonds for any reason, is necessarily higher than the probability of it happening for the particular reasons I've just described.  I'm not saying these are high probabilities, but they are probabilities.  Treasury bills are nowhere near "risk free". 

In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported from our own universe into the universe of Norse mythology.  This world is based on magic rather than technology; so naturally, when Our Hero tries to light a fire with a match brought along from Earth, the match fails to strike.

I realize it was only a fantasy story, but... how do I put this...

No.

A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings.  Yet strangely enough, I can't find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.

So is rationality orthogonal to feeling?  No; our emotions arise from our models of reality.  If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy; if I wake up and realize it was a dream, I will be sad.  P. C. Hodgell said:  "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."  My dreaming self's happiness was opposed by truth.  My sadness on waking is rational; there is no truth which destroys it.

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.

Michael Vassar once suggested:  "Status makes people effectively stupid, as it makes it harder for them to update their public positions without feeling that they are losing face."

To the extent that status does, in fact, make people stupid, this is a rather important phenomenon for a society like ours in which practically all decisions and beliefs pass through the hands of very-high-status individuals (a high "cognitive Gini coefficient").

Does status actually make people stupid?  It's hard to say because I haven't tracked many careers over time.  I do have a definite and strong impression, with respect to many high-status individuals, that it would have been a lot easier to have an intelligent conversation with them, if I'd approached them before they made it big.  But where does that impression come from, since I haven't actually tracked them over time?  (Fundamental question of rationality:  What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?)  My best guess for why my brain seems to believe this:  I know it's possible to have intelligent conversations with smart grad students, and I get the strong impression that high-status people used to be those grad students, but now it's much harder to have intelligent conversations with them than with smart grad students.

Hypotheses:

1. Vassar's hypothesis:  Higher status increases the amount of face you lose when you change your mind, or increases the cost of losing face.
2. The open-mindedness needed to consider interesting new ideas is (was) only an evolutionary advantage for low-status individuals seeking a good idea to ride to high status.  Once high status is achieved, new ideas are high-risk gambles with less relative payoff - the optimal strategy is to be mainstream.  I think Robin Hanson had a post about this but I can't recall the title.
3. Intelligence as such is a high-cost feature which is no longer necessary once status is achieved.  We can call this the Llinas Hypothesis.
4. High-status individuals were intelligent when they were young; the observed disparity is due solely to the standard declines of aging.

Lady Justice is widely depicted as carrying a scales.  A scales has the property that whatever pulls one side down, pushes the other side up.  This makes things very convenient and easy to track.  It's also usually a gross distortion.

In human discourse there is a natural tendency to treat discussion as a form of combat, an extension of war, a sport; and in sports you only need to keep track of how many points have been scored by each team.  There are only two sides, and every point scored against one side, is a point in favor of the other.  Everyone in the audience keeps a mental running count of how many points each speaker scores against the other.  At the end of the debate, the speaker who has scored more points is, obviously, the winner; so everything he says must be true, and everything the loser says must be wrong.

In case you missed the notice at the SIAI Blog, the Singularity Institute's next Challenge Grant is now running - $100,000 of matching funds for all donations until February 28th, 2010.  If you want your donation to be tax-deductible in the U.S. for 2009, donations postmarked by December 31st will be counted for this tax year.

Date:  September 11th, 2001.
Personnel:  Unknown [designate A], Unknown [designate B], Unknown [designate C].

A:  It's done.  The plane targeted at Congress was crashed by those on-board, but the Pentagon and Trade Center attacks occurred just as scheduled.

B:  Congress seems sufficiently angry in any case.  I don't think the further steps of the plan will meet with any opposition.  We should gain the governmental powers we need, and the stock market should move as expected.

A:  Good.  Have you prepared the conspiracy theorists to accuse us?

B:  Yes.  All is in readiness.  The first accusations will fly within the hour.

C:  Er...

A:  What is it?

C:  Sorry, I know I'm a bit new to this sort of thing, but why are we sponsoring conspiracy theorists?  Aren't they our arch-nemeses, tenaciously hunting down and exposing our lies?

A:  No, my young apprentice, just the opposite.  As soon as you pull off a conspiracy, the first thing you do is start a conspiracy theory about it.  Day one.

An edited transcript of a long instant-messenger conversation that took place regarding the phrase, "I don't know", sparked by Robin Hanson's previous post, "You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion."