nerfhammer

I'm experimenting with a new rationalist subreddit on reddit.com /r/rationalisthmus Starting with links populated from the planet rationalist data set - to which I've added about 50 new sources in the past few weeks.

Change blindness is the phenomenon whereby people fail to notice changes in scenery and whatnot if they're not directed to pay attention to it. There are countless videos online demonstrating this effect (one of my favorites here, by Richard Wiseman). One of the most audacious and famous experiments is known...

Found in an old Kahneman & Tversky paper: > There are two programs in a high school. Boys are a majority (65%) in program A, and a minority (45%) in program B. There is an equal number of classes in each of the two programs. > > You enter a...

From Steven Pinker's latest book: > Suppose you live in a place that has a constant chance of being struck by lightning at any time throughout the year. Suppose that the strikes are random: every day the chance of a strike is the same, and the rate works out to...

* Conservatism * Curse of knowledge * Duration neglect * Extension neglect * Extrinsic incentives bias * Illusion of external agency * Illusion of validity * Insensitivity to sample size * Lady Macbeth effect * Less-is-better effect * Naïve cynicism * Naïve realism * Reactive devaluation * Rhyme-as-reason effect *...

This came on the nyc list, I thought I would adapt it here. Cognitive biases have names. That's what makes them memetic. It's easier to think about something that has a name. Though I think the benefits outweigh the costs, there is also the risk of a little Albert: a...

After input from many of you guys and the NYC group, I am announcing planetrationalist.com There's a lot of different directions this sort of idea could go in, but I figured that this could be a good-enough first effort. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.