Rixie

I have taken the survey.

I feel like this thought experiment is less about how to cleverly communicate to Archimedes all the things that he is obviously wrong about and that we are obviously right about, and more about how to try to recognize the potential mistakes within our own way of thinking, as Archimedes was as certain about his geocentric point of view as we are with our heliocentric one. While I think we're right about heliocentrism at least, there may be other seemingly obvious facts that we take for granted, but that future generations will want to yell at us through a c... (read more)

Yay, survey taken!

I loved the Prisoner's Dilemma at the end, I wonder how that will turn out?

I started letting go of my faith when I realized that there really isn't much Bayesian evidence for it. Realizing that the majority of the evidence needed to believe something is used just to isolate that something out of all the other possible beliefs finished it off. But I do have one question: If Jesus wasn't magic, where did the Bible even come from? Lee Strobel "proves" that Jesus died and came back from the dead, but his proofs are based on the Bible. Why was the Bible so widely accepted if there wasn't anything extra-special about Jesus after all?

Here I have a question that is slightly unrelated, but I'm looking for a good cognitive science science fair project and I'm having trouble thinking of one that would be not completely impractical for a high-schooler to do, won't take more than a few months, and would be interesting enough to hold people's attention for at least a few minutes before they head off to the physics and medical research projects. No one ever does decent cognitive science projects and I really want to show them that this branch of science can be just as rigorous and awesome as the other ones. Does anyone have any ideas?

It's not necessarily solely for the purpose of overcoming bias. He's also telling the truth and letting us see things in a different light.

I think he's saying that atheists should (to a certain extent) honour him, and Christians should believe that he died forever. I'm not familiar with the other religions, but just because someone believes something now, doesn't mean that that will never change. Isn't the whole point of this blog to spread truth around?

I wonder if this really one hundred percent bias? I hate saying this, but when I moved to a new school 3 years ago I immediately noticed one person that I found extremely unattractive, and he later turned out to be one of the "bad kids", and did measurably bad things with two of his friends that no one besides them did. I don't think it was hindsight, I remember the exact moment when I first saw him and thought that he wasn't that attractive.

Could there possibly be some correlation between attractiveness and some other good qualities?

What is 3^^^3? I see it a lot here, why is it special?

But then you can't just borrow and not give it back.

The thing abut reductionists is that they think they're right.

Therefore, anti-reductionists are wrong.

Which means that anti-reductionists either don't have all the facts, or are choosing to ignore the facts, or are succumbing to other belief-in-belief-type biases.

When you're talking about someone you know to be wrong, the kindest thing that you can say about them is that they didn't have all their facts right.

Hey, sorry, just an unrelated question here, but:

Is The Feynman Lectures on Physics still worth reading?

When I was very young I was also very curious, but I sated my curiosity by telling myself that I would know it all when I was grown up. It wasn't my problem to be curious about these things, other people were handling them. Maybe Eliezer's classmates were thinking that this didn't really make sense, but they trusted the adults enough to do it anyways. Like how a lit lightbulb turns less mysterious and wonderful when you know that someone else already knows the scientific reason for it. All you need to do is follow the instructions and you'll get light.

Maybe humans do this because if we know that someone else knows the answer to the question, it's not our problem anymore, we can safely ignore it and work on other things. Maybe if there were an elephant trainer standing next to the elephant in your living room (maybe not your living room, otherwise you'd be worried about property damage and such) holding an elephant leash and saying "Don't worry, I got this," you'd be content to walk on by if you'd seen green elephants before and had something else that you needed to be doing.

I suppose that in the "ancestral environment", if someone else already knows how to solve the problem, you can safely ignore it.

Eliezer, I love how you can write passionately and poetically about a topic that many people consider stone cold. It really shows how important this all is to you, and it's much more fun to read.

I'm so glad that you lived your life the way you did and made the mistakes you did and became the person that you are, because if you didn't have your background and your skill set I might never have learned about rationality or Bayes' theorem, or read the best fan fiction there is.

Thank you so much for being you, it makes being us just that much better.

Maybe because Southeners were used to hot weather and didn't put any real effort into actively combatting the hot weather the way Northeners had to?

I read about a study like that, in which Christians prayed for people to recover from cancer. There was barely any difference between the patients that weren't prayed for, the patients that were prayed for and knee that they were being prayed for, and the patients that didn't know that they were being prayed for.

I'm collecting quotes to help me remember all the things that I should be remembering in order to overcome bias, and I'm wondering if someone has one for the sub-sequence on the Affect Heuristic.

Maybe there could be a paragraph in a box or something at the bottom of each post that contains the "take home" lesson for each post, to make it easier for people who are trying to review.

I don't understand how the answer could be anything but 50/50.
I know the right answer, but if you deleted it from my brain I never would have figured it out.
I guess I'm looking for an explanation that isn't just following through examples from every scenario.
Does an explanation like that exist?

I was rereading some of the core sequences and I came across this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/