Rationality

Rationality

Updating your beliefs

Seek truth

Achieving your values

Why?

• Curiosity

• Utility

• Morality

How?

• Probability and decision theory (and 2 limitations)

Biases

• Availability Heuristic

• Selective reporting

• Events that have never happened deemed to have probability zero

• Memory is not always a good guide to probabilities in the past, let alone in the future

• Conjunction Fallacy

• Substitute judgement of representativeness for judgement of probability

• Corroborative details lend verisimilitude to the narrative

• Solutions:

• Add absurdities: where the absurdity is the log probability

• Feed stronger emotional impact from Occam’s Razor - every added detail is a burden

• Planning Fallacy

• People think they can plan

• Solutions:

• Outside view over the inside view

• Illusion of Transparency

• Hindsight: people know the outcome of a situation and believe that should have been easy to predict

• We know what we mean by our words and expect others to understand it

• Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think

• Solutions:

• Lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what audience already knows or accepts

The Lens

• You can think about which sort of thinking processes will create beliefs which mirror reality, and which thinking processes will not

• This ability is rare in the animal kingdom

• Science is a reflective process about a reliable process for making contents of your mind mirror the contents of the world

• Hope cannot have that large an effect on the world;

• To ask which beliefs make you happy is to turn inward, not outward. Are you against happiness?

• If you can see that hope is shifting your first-order thoughts by too large a degree - if you can understand your mind as a mapping engine that has flaws - then you can apply a reflective correction

Fake beliefs (Anticipation controller):

• If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Do you anticipate different experiences?

• We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other—call these floating beliefs

• A perversion of Homo sapiens’s ability to build more general and flexible belief networks

• The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict - or better yet, prohibit

• Above all, don’t ask what to believe - ask what to anticipate

Belief in belief:

• Not all beliefs are direct anticipation

• Much easier to believe that you ought to believe it

• Belief in belief is virtuous

• When someone makes excuses in advance it would seem to require that belief and belief in belief have become unsynchronized

Pretending to be wise:

• Staying above the fray and looking down with a lofty and condescending gaze is particularly pretentious

• Part of it also has to do with signaling a superior vantage point

• Neutrality is a definite judgement

• when confronted with reasons to be skeptics, they instead become relativists, that is, when the rational conclusion is to suspend judgment about an issue, all too many people instead conclude that any judgment is as plausible as any other

• The responsibilities that you deprioritize are a matter of your limited resources

Professing and cheering:

• when people profess their beliefs about ridiculous things, they’ll spend much more effort to convince themselves that they take their beliefs seriously

• Deliberate flaunting

• Self-satisfaction

• Pride parade

• Ties a belief to the self

• Cognitive dissonance

Belief as Attire

• Identifying with a tribe is a very strong emotional force
• People will die for it
• And once you get people to identify with a tribe, the beliefs which are attire of that tribe will be spoken with the full passion of belonging to that tribe