It has been noticed since the time immemorial that cognitive biases have a nasty tendency of being invisible to self (note the proverbial log in one's eye). Uncovering their own blind spot is probably the hardest task for an aspired rationalist. EY and others have devoted a number of posts to this issue (e.g. the How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence), and I am wondering if it is bearing fruit for the LW participants.
To this end, I suggest that people post what they think their current rationality blind spot they are struggling with is (not the usual sweet success stories of "overcoming bias"), and let others comment on whether they agree or not, given their impressions of the person here and possibly in real life. My guess is that most of us would miss the mark widely (it's called a blind spot for a reason). Needless to say, if you post, you should expect to get crockered. Also needless to say, if you disagree with a person pointing out your bias, odds are that you are the one who is wrong.
(Who, me, go first? Oh, I have no biases, at least none that I can see.)
If I only had a single blind spot... But probably the most prominent is that I can't stop feeling inside that life is guided by some sort of coherent narrative. E.G., I've had some hard times in the last few years, but very recently I got lucky and found a really good job (and considering the situation of the job market in Italy this means REALLY lucky). I just can't stop feeling that I somewhat deserved it, via the usual narrative pattern of great difficulties -> final reward. It's a very subtle mechanism, and I very often fail to notice that my mind is organizing what happens into a pseudo-coherent pattern. This sometimes leads to very stupid decisions, like not going out with friends because it doesn't properly fit with my schedule (even if I can accomodate it with some efffort), and so it wasn't meant to be. I'm working on it at the moment, but it will probably be a long way to eliminate the blind spot.
I had an existential crisis a few weeks ago that was very helpful. I now fully believe "it's physics all the way down." It's also given me some insights as to how self-awareness arises in physical systems, and made me realize cryonics is trivially workable. I also have an intuitive feel for how humanity is collectively wearing rose-colored glasses, and am very curious what happens when these will get taken off! (In other words, I look forward to the creation of a fully rational agent according to a prescribed utility function.)
This also means I c... (read more)