Clearer Thinking

Congratulations on the launch of the newsletter OP. Another news letter on rational thinking I would recommend is ClearThinking[1]. They also have several tools, tests for rationality/biases, specifically useful if we want to test ourself or someone else for a job for which these would be a problem. [1]https://www.clearerthinking.org/

This study was a followup to one that just used signs [1], which yielded performance no better than chance. If the summer/winter correlation held, then that study would have shown positive results, which it did not. There's nothing to say that these star charts or seasons of birth cannot correlate with personality traits or life outcomes. But Astrology, as a practice, is not useful for unwinding those correlations. If you have some alternate system, feel free to propose it -- pump the star charts and personality charts from this study into some AI and see if it can come up with some kind of super-astrology, and then try to replicate it. I doubt you'd find anything stronger than predicting the answer to the question "were you born in the summer or the winter". [1] https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/we-tested-the-predictive-power-of…

Good place to start: https://www.clearerthinking.org Join your local Skeptics circle.

http://www.clearerthinking.org/ is pretty close to what you're looking for.

So, yeah, but an interesting chunk of results: is the inter-rater agreement ACTUALLY random? (Not sure if this is formatted correctly, feel free to comment if you'd do these stats differently) from scipy.stats import binomtest # stats: {experience_level: (rate, num_in_group)} stats = { "lvl1": (20.5, 156), "lvl2": (22.2, 66), "lvl3": (23.3, 50), "lvl4": (21.2, 39), "lvl5": (20.8, 12), "lvl6": (28.3, 5), } for lvl, (rate, num) in stats.items(): num_tests = num * (num - 1) res = binomtest(int(rate * num_tests * 0.01), num_tests, 0.2, alternative="greater") # with multiple comparison correction with bonferroni print(f"{lvl}: p-value = {res.pvalue:.4f} {'*' if res.pvalue < 0.05 / 6 else ''}") print('* indicates p-value is < 0.05 after bonferroni correction') """ lvl1: p-value = 0.0276 lvl2: p-value = 0.0002 * lvl3: p-value = 0.0000 * lvl4: p-value = 0.1337 lvl5: p-value = 0.4826 lvl6: p-value = 0.3704 * indicates p-value is < 0.05 after bonferroni correction """ So maybe there's an internal consistency in how these people are trained, and maybe it's not completely dependent on skill level. This is assuming I read the…

Identify elements of good/bad communication patterns: https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication/ Non-violent communication is a very structured approach to guiding people through perceived difficult behaviour: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/03/06/Want-to-improve-your-r… Gain a little understanding about the give and take of communication: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lot… If possible, try to spend more time with people who espouse these desired characteristics and less time with those who don't. Finally, conversation should be...fun...if possible. If you hack your way to being 100% in control of things all the time, then how much fun is that going to be for others?

You might want to checkout out NVC: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/03/06/want-to-improve-your-r… I found it through HN and for me, personally, it has helped.

> > twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS. Here's a twin study from 2015, newer than the books (Clean Slate etc) and papers you (David) mentioned. "Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4286575/ Figure 3 indicates that intelligence is pretty strongly inherited, and they arrive at 0.44. Now you're saying that that doesn't matter because of GWAS? Sounds a bit hand-wavy to me. > > Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com Blog post looks biased. So there's a controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_heritability_problem And there's two camps: https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/the-missing-heritability-problem-… (I like that article!) And the two of you (Davind and Thomas) seem to be in the "The DNA Proponents" camp. The other is "The Twin Study Advocates" camp. I guess now I'm in "The middle ground" camp, no longer in the "Twin Study Advocates". Thanks for that. Maybe I'll check back in 10 years later and see what has happened.