Tesseract

[Link] Some notes on Rationality in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

This particular reference is from James & Bolstein, 1992, and Eliezer gets it from Influence, Science and Practice. It's on chapter 2, page 26 in the fifth edition.

Replying toRationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance

Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance

This comment is shockingly insightful and I would like to thank you for it.

Replying toRationality Quotes February 2012

Rationality Quotes February 2012

What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.

Geoffrey Warnock

Teaching a short class on Bayes' Theorem?

14y

At my college, there's a week before Spring Semester each year in which anyone who wants to can teach a class on any subject, and students go to whatever ones they feel like. I'm thinking about teaching a class on Bayes' Theorem. It would be informal, one to two hours long, and focused mostly on non-obvious applications of it (epistemology, the representativeness heuristic, etc.)

At the moment, I'm thinking about how to design the class, so I'd appreciate any suggestions as to what content I should cover, the best format, clear ways to explain it, cool things related to Bayes' Theorem, good links, and so forth.

Education helps close the gap between what man believes to be the truth and truth itself.

Richard Scholz

One of the toughest things in any science... is to weed out the ideas that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.

Thomas Carew

A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.

(McKay & Dennett 2009)

Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

Euripides, Helen

Replying toIdeas for heuristics and biases research topic?

Ideas for heuristics and biases research topic?

Ah, I think you misunderstood me (on reflection, I wasn't very clear) — I'm doing an experiment, not a research project in the sense of looking over the existing literature.

(For the record, I decided on conducting something along the lines of the studies mentioned in this post to look at how distraction influences retention of false information.)

Ideas for heuristics and biases research topic?

Judgment Under Uncertainty summaries, Part 1: Representativeness

14y

Hey Less Wrong,

I'm currently taking a cognitive psychology class, and will be designing and conducting a research project in the field — and I'd like to do it on human judgment, specifically heuristics and biases. I'm currently doing preliminary research to come up with a more specific topic to base my project on, and I figured Less Wrong would be the place to come to find questions about flawed human judgment. So: any ideas?

(I'll probably be using these ideas mostly as guidelines for forming my research question, since I doubt it would be academically honest to take them outright. The study will probably take the form of a questionnaire or online survey, but experimental manipulation is certainly possible and it might be possible to make use of other psych department resources.)

Background material for reading Judgment Under Uncertainty?

15y

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases is one of the foundational works on the flaws of human reasoning, and as such gets cited a lot on Less Wrong — but it's also rather long and esoteric, which makes it inaccessible to most Less Wrong users. Over the next few months, I'm going to attempt to distill the essence of the studies that make up the collection, in an attempt to convey the many interesting bits without forcing you to slog through the 500 or so pages of the volume itself. This post summarizes sections I (Introduction) and II (Representativeness).

By way of background: Judgment Under Uncertainty is a collection of 35 scientific papers... (read 1521 more words →)

Calculus textbook recommendation?

15y

After seeing it constantly referenced in the Sequences and elsewhere, I've picked up Kahneman and Tversky's book/collection of papers Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. I was wondering if anyone here who's read it or knows the subject would recommend any prefatory material so that it makes more sense/is more meaningful.

Personal background: [Personal information deleted] From that and from this site, I'm passingly familiar with e.g. the representativeness heuristic and Bayesian probability, but I've never had to use it much in any academic setting.

Any advice before I delve into it?

Link: "When Science Goes Psychic"

15y

I'm seeking suggestions for a calculus textbook that I could use to teach myself the subject.

Details:

[Personal details removed.] I know that most calculus textbooks are designed to be taught to classes, so I was wondering if anyone knew of a textbook specifically designed for autodidacts, or one that would be particularly useful for the purpose. (If you just know of a good general textbook, I'd be grateful to hear that as well.)

Thanks to anyone who gives a suggestion.

EDIT: Chose a Marvin-Gardner-edited version of Calculus Made Easy, accompanied by Khan Academy lessons.

Meta: Cleaning the front page

15y

A major psychology journal is planning to publish a study that claims to present strong evidence for precognition. Naturally, this immediately stirred up a firestorm. There are a lot of scientific-process and philosophy-of-science issues involved, including replicability, peer review, Bayesian statistics, and degrees of scrutiny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes a guest appearance.

Original New York Times article on the study here.

And the Times asked a number of academics (including Douglas Hofstadter) to comment on the controversy. The discussion is here.

I, for one, defy the data.

The Truth about Scotsmen, or: Dissolving Fallacies

15y

All the meetup announcements get promoted, so the front page ends up full of 'em: half of it right now (5/10) is meetup announcements, and with the addition of the quote threads only 30% of the front page is currently 'content'. While meetup announcements are all well and good, it seems counterproductive to have them up there after the meetup date, as is the case with four out of the current five -- it just clutters up the front page even more without providing any benefit.

If post promotion is reversible, it would seem to be a simple step for one of the moderators to depromote each meetup announcement once it's taken place.

(Apologies if this is the wrong place to put an organizational suggestion; I didn't find any obvious better place.)