Overcoming Bias

Lots of great blogs here. One I haven't seen mentioned yet is Robin Hanson's - https://www.overcomingbias.com

I was sad to see intrade.com close. predictit.org still offers political prediction markets. BTW, Robin Hanson's blog is a good read: http://www.overcomingbias.com/. He explores in-depth the topic of "Ems" (people emulated on computers in a world where AGI doesn't exist).

I completely don't see the problem he's writing about, my favourite blogs don't post daily, some authors post 1-3 times a month[1]. Others are bringing co-bloggers on board, and even then only come up with a few posts a week[2]. That's why RSS must live on. It takes over 200 subscriptions to get a decent daily dose of reading out of blogs like that. [1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ [2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/

It's not at all controversial--standard social signaling theory. GMU Econ professor Robin Hanson's blog, http://overcomingbias.com, has stuff about it all the time. Here's some more classic citations: http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_economics_01.htm…

I knew that I recognized his name. He writes http://overcomingbias.com/ which, along with http://lesswrong.com/ keeps me making sense. (Both are worth reading regularly.)

Those interested in the art of human rationality should check out these two excellent sister sites: http://lesswrong.com (click on the about page, and then start with the post sequences linked next to "about", not with the most recent posts) http://www.overcomingbias.com

If any readers are interested in this sort of thing, then I highly (very, very highly) recommend the following links: http://www.overcomingbias.com http://www.lesswrong.com

http://www.overcomingbias.com 7... we get a lot of random incoming Google traffic. Though it's worth noting that our traffic stats fell off a cliff over winter break, for some odd reason. Anyone else seen this? Or is it just that OB is commonly read as a procrastinating substitute for school/work? Holiday cliff: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s28overcomingbias&r=12

Humans are not rational beings, their judgments are driven by certain inbuilt heuristics and biases. Excellent intro to the topic: http://singinst.org/Biases.pdf Excellent blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com

The final sentence is key: Unless we take our innate biases into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse. So take your innate biases into account. Familiarise yourself with them. Read books like "Predictably Irrational". Follow Eliezer Yudkowsky most excellent articles on http://www.overcomingbias.com/ (and read his awesome "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_… ). Be aware of those biases. Your subconscious has biases too. Don't take its answers for granted - test them out. Practice figuring out what your subconscious is biased about, and correct for that. Being a rational thinker is not about explaining/rationalising your conclusions, it's about using subconscious and conscious reasoning in tandem, being aware of the shortcomings of both, and building up to valid conclusions based on whatever evidence you can get your hands on (and acquiring more evidence where useful).

Discuss morality with intelligent people, and study evolutionary psychology, and it will not take you long to realize that every moral system has some edge cases where obeying it will lead to stomach-turning results. Our moral intuitions are lumpy, inconsistent, and contradictory. This is to be expected because we were designed by blind evolution, and not by any sort of logical process. Ethical systems serve as great guidelines, but it is impossible to find one simple set of consistent ideas to capture everything that an average person feels is right. It is even more impossible (for a non-theist) to find some sort of objective measure of value by which to determine morality. >"Without this, human actions are no longer guided by reason, and that is a very bad situation." Human actions are guided by reason, but never solely by reason. We have a lot of innate biases left over from our 3 billion year evolution. I think you would enjoy this blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/

There are a number of variations. You might actually be thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml or possibly https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-links ).

Kai Chang's "Dr. K" in economics (2008) https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml - https://zenmoments.org/my-favorite-liar/ "let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie."

Regarding parasocial relationships in general, I like [0]: > a few exceptional people (many of them imaginary) get far more love than most people need or can enjoy. > This seems an essential tragedy of the human condition. You might claim that love isn’t a limited resource, that the more people each of us love, the more love we each have to give out. So there is no conflict between loving popular and imaginary people and loving the rest of us. But while this might be true at some low scales of how many people we love, at the actual scales of love this just doesn’t seem right to me. Love instead seems scarce at the margin. > Please, someone thoughtful and clever, figure out how we might all be much loved. [0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/alas-unequal-lovehtml

The problem with this discussion is thinking that the good life is about access to material resources and that we should examine unequal access to them and fix that. It is simply missing that there are other more important inequalities and that people are being deprived of other things in life. Main one being mating opportunities and access to attractive sexual partners. You could fix inequality in access to material resources, but then people who are ugly would still be deprived of having attractive mates who love them. Interesting read: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/comparing-income-sex-redistributionht…

Nobody is forced to work at Tesla or SpaceX or any Musk company. I love the mission. I would never work there. They expect grueling hours and a level of commitment that I don't want to give. It is not abusive to voluntarily work somewhere. It is not abusive to have a culture of work that is way more intense than the average workplace. The level of Urban's golem-think [1] that exists around Musk because he himself sometimes says stupid things is seriously unbelievable. [1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/tim-urbans-whats-our-problem

Right now, I'd say Robin Hanson (@robinhanson https://www.overcomingbias.com/). Mostly resonates with me because he seems to freely challenge established norms in very thought provoking ways.

I love that the article I presume you got that from [1] states: > Acceptable answers include statement such as: > To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community. Which is not only grammatically incorrect, but grammatically incorrect to the point of message-shattering ambiguity. Is the triplet of statements required for an acceptable answer, or would any individual statement from that list suffice? If all three would be required I doubt I'd have been marked correct - I would have just listed the most important one then moved on to the next question. [1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html (first search result for "Se Habla Español Hits Chicago" besides the link you gave)

Relevant classic from 2009: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html

For more background and related material, look at Hansons blog[0] or the dedicated website[1]. [0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/?s=aliens [1]: https://grabbyaliens.com/

RSS. Look at https://www.overcomingbias.com/ as an example of a microblog. Tweeter’s main selling point is the lack of friction, but this is also why it’s so low quality.

For anyone noting the 1998 date and not already aware, Robin Hason is still writing on the topic off and on at the _Overcoming Bias_ blog, and has had a few posts on the topic just this month: "Why We Can’t See Grabby Aliens" -- more generally about life in the universe at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/why-we-cant-see-grabby-aliens.h… and "Try-Menu-Combo Filter Steps" explicitly talking about the Great Filter idea some more at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/try-menu-combo-filter-steps.htm…

The problem is that people don't want surprises - they want confirmations of what they already believe. "The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/ Somehow we what we value is not information. Maybe it is the political use of it - we want to know so that we can pass it to others from our group? It is perhaps the number one criteria for evaluating an internet source now - does the author(s) welcome surprises? Is there any curiosity in his writing? Hacker News is still quite good on that. Some others: https://marginalrevolution.com/, https://www.gwern.net/index, https://www.overcomingbias.com/

Disagree. GPT-2/GPT-3 are able to pass for humans when the reader isn't paying close attention. This article seems insightful to me: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/03/better-babblers.html A scarily large amount of human speech is essentially word prediction, especially in cases where someone wants to seem impressive without having actually done the work. We're all familiar with the problem of people "bullshitting" about technical topics, especially in the business realm where there are lots of people with no technical background who want to learn and have authoritative opinions on technology, like in this article. The GPT models are quite capable of producing this kind of "sounds legit" speech. And if that isn't a form of intelligence, then what is?

Robin Hanson has a been a strong proponent of this idea. If you're curious about this subject, this post is a must read: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-covid19-deat…

I remember Robin Hanson [1] used the second fact to recommend "variolation", injecting everyone with a tiny amount of the virus so that they'll get the immunity without the sickness (making it a "natural vaccine"). [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/variolation-may-cut-covid19-deat…

Under certain assumptions, young and healthy people getting infected would be the best course of action: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/expose-the-young.html

This blog post is related to Robin Hanson's recent post, "Can Foundational Physics Be Saved?"[0] Hanson has also posted a follow-up in response to the HN-linked post by Hossenfelder. That is "Response to Hossenfelder"[1]. [0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/12/can-foundational-physics-be-sav… [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/12/hossenfelder.html

Robin Hanson wrote about similar experiments in 2010: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/looking-too-good.html As others here have suggested (e.g. jpfed, Tade0), it seems that extreme generosity can be regarded as establishing an undesirable behavior standard. The post suggests a workaround, if your productivity/generosity greatly exceeds others: under-report your output and give credit to others.

Every single government primary and secondary education system on Earth is a direct descendant of the Prussian one. Non-existent to very limited choice of how one spends ones time, constant ranking and grading to inure people to dominance behaviours that do not come naturally, and all in groups that are age normed rather than competence or ability normed. School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html