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.

2 and 5 struck me as common sense. I see reasons for 5 to be reversed now that I know the result [yeah...], but I still don't understand why 2 is wrong. Not really the point of the question, but I do wonder...

I wouldn't expect a deity to answer that sort of prayer. You're not being sincere, just trying to test them, which many canonically find annoying because it shows mistrust; you don't need that die to land on a four; it suggests you'd use prayer to lowly ends (e.g. "Let me score a touchdown" rather than "Please solve world hunger"); it gives an easily publishable result, which no deity would characteristically accept - if they didn't want to be discreet they'd still be doing showy miracles. Studies where you pray to cure cancer or something are much stronger evidence.

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 know what monty might have done in the original show to screw with the probability, but the usual analysis is correct and can be verified with as much simulation as you like.

I suspect that players would be unable to make the correct decision given the pressure and psychological manipulations coming from monty. Especially considering that highly intelligent people will argue for days that it's 50/50 up until they do a simulation and actually see the result; it's not an easy problem for untrained people.

Think of the conformity research. Monty could be saying things like "are you sure you want to switch?". Also, I think people may have a bias that causes them to think "man I'd feel stupid if I switched and got it wrong, but it would be ok if I didn't switch and got it wrong".

This game show is pre-internet so everyone would be on their own with regards to coming up with the solution beforehand. And nearly everyone gets it wrong at first.

I wonder how much selection bias there is in the type of people who actually got on the show.

...right. I take your point.