Overcoming bias

[ciphergoth]

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

This site is totally fascinating, and like TV Tropes and Wikipedia, it has that hyperlink-means-staying-forever power.

ETA: I'm going to start adding some especially cool entries here as I find them:

• Belief in belief
• Making beliefs pay rent
• Hindsight bias
• The proper use of doubt

ETA: I can't help but notice that all the essays that make me go "eee!" are by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also describes the Twelve Virtues of Rationality. I think I have a new hero.

ETA: I'll probably link back to here in another post once I've added a few more links.

• Outside the laboratory
• Human evil and muddled thinking
• How to seem (and be) deep

Comments

[djm4]

It strikes me that one of my problems with Dawkins is that he does the 'belief in belief' thing about religion. He believes he understands religion and religious people, and any attempt to get him to understand better is met with a flat 'don't need to, so shan't!' The preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion is, to my mind, a stream of replies to the arguments Dawkins believes people are making and really, really wants them to be making. And the replies are good ... in whatever parallel universe Dawkins is in where the invisible, intangible dragon is real. But the replies don't fit my experience of many of the religious, and of religion, nor do they fit many of the criticisms of Dawkins.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I completely disagree. Being someone who has direct experience of having been very religious and then, over a period of time, moving to being a very strong atheist, I happen to think Dawkins is completely justified in his approach.

[djm4]

Yes. As with the many other believers in my life who perceive things I don't, and don't perceive things I do, I've no idea if either of us is blind/hallucinating, or if the same things just look different wehn viewed by someone else. And without swapping brains, I suspect we've no way of knowing.

In other words, I don't know whether even to ask 'which of us is wrong?' is a meaningful question.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky does the Dawkins thing about religious belief, too, in that she clearly has only a very partial understanding of it or experience of people who have it. For instance, I have known many people who quite openly said that they did not believe but felt they ought to, or wanted to, or some such thing, and I find it quite patronising of her to assume that it's a rarity to be able to distinguish the two states of mind or that she (not being my mental health professional) knows better than I do what is going on in my mind. I have certainly been conscious in the past of believing things that I did not want to believe, and I am conscious now of wanting to believe several of the things that I do in fact believe. I think all the permutations of that one are quite possible. I can also think of numerous reasons why Jesuits would encourage their novices to doubt. Sheesh, atheism really needs some writers who evidence broader imaginations than those two do (and probably has them, yes, I ought to get round to reading some Sagan at some point).

More seriously, for someone with apparently quite a lot of philosophical training, I find it very odd that she doesn't consider the possibility that the issue between the dragon-claimant and the questioner is a semantic one. Most English-speakers with philosophical training will be familiar with Wittgenstein's view that all philosophical problems are artefacts of language, and while that may or may not be true, it's certainly true of a great many of them. Failing to examine that possibility seriously weakens her whole argument about anticipation; rather than doing "fast footwork", it may simply be that the dragon-claimant had never expected anyone to think dragons were physical and is rather bemused about how to respond to the questioner.

Yudkowsky does at least seem more interested in increasing her understanding than Dawkins does, though (although I note that one of her commenters hints at the semantic issue and does not get a reply).