One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
— Bertrand Russell
I will duplicate some of my longer comments on OB here on my blog, as I’m not sure if all my readers are reading OB on a regular basis, and tracking comments there is difficult anyway. The post concerned (it’s not long): Overcoming Bias: Tyler Vid on Disagreement The sentence I disagree with is this: [...]
Long awaited, finally arrived: a list of all of Eli’s posts and a dependency graph!! Eliezer’s OB Posts Dependency Graphs Great resource for newcomers and oldtimers. Technorati Tags: rationality
Paul Graham has a wonderful essay online, reading time approximately 10 minutes: Lies We Tell Kids (The essay was brought to my notice via overcomingbias.com) Some quotes: This sentence is gold: The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you [...]
Isaac Asimov is one of my favourite science fiction authors. In this article he has a nice quote I would like to share: …when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just [...]
Bee at backreaction has a long post about the world’s current problem. Backreaction: On The Edge I didn’t read the whole post, but the quote below resounded with me because this is also what troubles me deeply: Intelligence is no longer an evolutionary advantage if the content of thought becomes increasingly abstract and theoretical. Our [...]
I know it’s a post by Eliezer when I find myself nodding in agreement through the whole article. Here he relates an occasion where somebody is not convinced by a probabilistic argument. I have had similar discussions, and they usually leave me exasperated Overcoming Bias: But There’s Still A Chance, Right? The last sentence raises [...]
A lot of posts on this blog will be about rationality, scientific realism etc. – you may ask how this is connected to complexity science. This is because my thesis work concerns looking at “human” systems (many individual agents acting independently – ok, so they’re pseudo-humans ). I am especially interested in the relationship of [...]
Here some more links devoted to rational thinking, which I found on the site mentioned in the previous post and which are simply excellent: Chance Welcome Page Fallacy Files Argument Mapping Tutorials Technorati Tags: bias, cognitive science, rationality, statistics
One of the most important skills today is critical thinking. We live in an information overflow society – the problem is not information access, but information filtering, and yes, even drawing conclusions contrary to the information being presented (because it is false/dumbed down/rests on false assumptions etc etc). I recently read a good paper by [...]
