Edit: If you are interested in this subject, I'd like to interview you to learn about your own experience with making difficult life mistakes. Hearing people's stories will help validate my framework and give me material for future essays. And I might be able to offer some interesting insights to...
There are certain harmful behaviors people are tricked into engaging in, because whereas the benefits of the behavior are concentrated, the harms are diffuse or insidious. Therefore, when you benefit, P(benefit is due to this behavior) ≈ 1, but when you're harmed, P(harm is due to this behavior) << 1,...
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it's...
Edit: If you are interested in this subject, I'd like to interview you to learn about your own experience with making difficult life mistakes. Hearing people's stories will help validate my framework and give me material for future essays. And I might be able to offer some interesting insights to you also. Please add me on Discord (username: chrisw5823). I would really appreciate it!
Making mistakes is fine; making major life-altering mistakes is something I recommend trying to avoid. In this post I will introduce a framework that can help with this.
The study of mistakes is fascinating from the perspective of rationality and biases. And from a practical perspective, it's very high impact.... (read 888 more words →)
There are certain harmful behaviors people are tricked into engaging in, because whereas the benefits of the behavior are concentrated, the harms are diffuse or insidious. Therefore, when you benefit, P(benefit is due to this behavior) ≈ 1, but when you're harmed, P(harm is due to this behavior) << 1, or in the insidious form, P(you consciously notice the harm) << 1.
An example is when I install handy little add-ons and programs that, in aggregate, cause my computer to slow down significantly. Every time I use one of these programs, I consciously appreciate how useful it is. But when it slows down my computer, I can't easily pinpoint it as the culprit, since there are so... (read more)
Even considering that, the 3% figure still seems wildly implausible. This would require something like 90% of the population thinking they pay 0% taxes, and the remaining 10% thinking they pay 30% taxes (which is still an underestimate).
The PDF that Louie linked to doesn't explain what the numbers mean. Surely there would be lots of articles about this epidemic of grossly underestimating taxes. Can anyone provide more evidence?
This is a great article, but it only lists studies where SPRs have succeeded. In fairness, it would be good to know if there were any studies that showed SPRs failing (and also consider publication bias, etc.).
Here is a very similar post on Ask Metafilter. (It is actually Ask Metafilter's most favorited post of all time.)
Here's an insightful comment on the article:
http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/ezm6s/the_mathematics_of_beauty/c1c87ts
This is the same reason that when shopping on Amazon I ignore the reviews from people who rated the product 1 or 5 stars. They often have an ulterior motive of trying to damage/help the image of the product as much as possible.
Related positions include operations research analysts and quants at finance firms.
It's a useful exercise for aspiring economists and rationalists to dissect charity into separate components of warm fuzzies vs. efficiency. However, maybe it's best for the general population not to be fully conscious that these are separate components, since the spirit of giving is like a frog: you can dissect it, but it dies in the process (adaptation of an E.B. White quote).
Lemma: we want charity to be enjoyable, so that more people are motivated to do it. (Analogy: capitalist countries let rich people keep their riches, to create an incentive for economic growth, even though it might create more utility in the short term to tax rich people very highly.)
Consider this... (read more)
These people comment only on difficult, controversial issues which are selected as issues where people perform worse than random.
Related, maybe they only comment when they have something original and unorthodox to say (selection bias). It's easy to echo conventional wisdom and be right most of the time; for a smart person it's more exciting to challenge conventional wisdom, even if this gives them a higher risk of being wrong. In other words, maybe they place a lower priority on karma points, and more on building their muscles for original thought.
Example 1: In my youth, I tried to only hold beliefs I could derive myself, rather than accepting what was told to me.... (read more)
I had the same issue with the Schwartz test. It seems not to correct for people who rate everything high (or low).
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it's often difficult to tease apart how much of this disagreement stems from them not "getting it", and how much stems from them having a different fundamental value system. One of the tests alerted me that I am an outlier in certain aspects of how I judge morality (green = me; blue = liberals; red = conservatives):
Another benefit of these quizzes is that they can point... (read more)
Talib Kweli is nonreligious, so I'm not changing the meaning of the quotation. "God" is often used poetically. Example:
"Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not."
Albert Einstein
Even if Kweli were religious the point would not be to put words in his mouth, but to reapply a beautiful quotation to another context where it is meaningful.