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Overcoming Bias : How Wrong Can We Be?
This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do. And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.
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Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.
Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing. The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product. Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.
Less Wrong: Why You're Stuck in a Narrative
Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. Obviously the real world isn't like this - events are complex and interrelated, direct causation is extremely rare, and outcomes are probabilistic. Verbally, we know this - the hard part, as always, is convincing our brain of the fact.
Less Wrong: Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
Hunter-gatherer superstition isn't much like what we think of as "religion". Early Westerners often derided it as not really being religion at all, and they were right, in my opinion. In the hunter-gatherer stage the supernatural agents aren't particularly moral, or charged with enforcing any rules; they may be placated with ceremonies, but not worshipped. But above all - they haven't yet split their epistemology. Hunter-gatherer cultures don't have special rules for reasoning about "supernatural" entities, or indeed an explicit distinction between supernatural entities and natural ones; the thunder spirits are just out there in the world, as evidenced by lightning, and the rain dance is supposed to manipulate them - it may not be perfect but it's the best rain dance developed so far, there was that famous time when it worked...
Gunnar Olsson: Abysmal - a Critique of Cartographic Reason
People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives.
[cs/0406061] The Complexity of Agreement
A celebrated 1976 theorem of Aumann asserts that honest, rational Bayesian agents with common priors will never "agree to disagree": if their opinions about any topic are common knowledge, then those opinions must be equal. Economists have written numerous papers examining the assumptions behind this theorem. But two key questions went unaddressed: first, can the agents reach agreement after a conversation of reasonable length? Second, can the computations needed for that conversation be performed efficiently? This paper answers both questions in the affirmative, thereby strengthening Aumann's original conclusion.
TheMoneyIllusion » Does Bryan Caplan believe in free trade?
Another way of putting my point was that I was primarily interested in a methodological question; do hypothetical thought experiments about moral scenarios unlikely to occur in reality improve our moral reasoning?
Public Reason - Home
Public Reason is a peer-reviewed journal of political and moral philosophy. Public Reason publishes articles, book reviews, as well as discussion notes from all the fields of political philosophy and ethics, including political theory, applied ethics, and legal philosophy. The Journal encourages the debate around rationality in politics and ethics in the larger context of the discussion concerning rationality as a philosophical problem.
Jürgen Habermas (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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In strategic action, actors are not so much interested in mutual
understanding as in achieving the individual goals they each bring to
the situation. -
In communicative action, or what Habermas later came to call
“strong communicative action” in “Some Further
Clarifications of the Concept of Communicative Rationality”
(1998b, chap. 7; German ed., 1999b), speakers coordinate their action
and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared
understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy.
Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their
individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors
freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits
cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently
consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize
the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and
its telos of rationally motivated agreement. - 1 more annotations...
Deborah Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge
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Ever since its origins in the seventeenth century,
if we are to believe its historians,
mathematical probability has oscillated, not to say equivocated, between two
interpretations, between saying how often a given kind of event happens, and
saying how much credence we should give a given assertion. -
In particular, if you think of probabilities as degrees-of-belief, it is
tempting, maybe even necessary, to regard Bayes's theorem as a rule for
assessing the evidential support of beliefs. For instance, let A be
"Mr. Geller is psychic" and B be "this spoon will bend without the
application of physical force." Once we've assigned p(A), p(B), and p(B|A),
we can calculate just how much more we ought to believe in Geller's psychic
powers after seeing him bend a spoon without visibly doing so. p(A) and p(B)
and sometimes even p(B|A) are, in this view, all reflections of our subjective
beliefs, before we examine the evidence. They are called the "prior
probabilities," or even just the "priors." The prize, p(A|B), is the
"posterior," and regarded as the weight we should give to a hypothesis (A) on
the strength of a given piece of evidence (B). As I said, it's hard to avoid
this interpretation if you think of probabilities as degrees-of-belief, and
there is a large, outspoken and able school of methodologists and statisticians
who insist that this is the way of thinking about probability,
scientific inference, and indeed rationality in general: the Bayesian Way.
The Problem of Induction (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Until about the middle of the previous century induction was treated as a quite specific method of inference: inference of a universal affirmative proposition (All swans are white) from its instances (a is a white swan, b is a white swan, etc.) The method had also a probabilistic form, in which the conclusion stated a probabilistic connection between the properties in question. It is no longer possible to think of induction in such a restricted way; much synthetic or contingent inference is now taken to be inductive; some authorities go so far as to count all contingent inference as inductive. One powerful force driving this lexical shift was certainly the erosion of the intimate classical relation between logical truth and logical form; propositions had classically been categorized as universal or particular, negative or affirmative; and modern logic renders those distinctions unimportant. (The paradox of the ravens makes this evident.) The distinction between logic and mathematics also waned in the twentieth century, and this, along with the simple axiomatization of probability by Kolmogorov in 1933 (Kolmogorov, FTP) blended probabilistic and inductive methods, blending in the process structural differences among inferences.
As induction expanded and became more amorphous, the problem of induction was transformed too. The classical problem if apparently insoluble was simply stated, but the contemporary problem of induction has no such crisp formulation. The approach taken here is to provide brief expositions of several distinctive accounts of induction. This is not comprehensive, there are other ways to look at the problem, but the untutored reader may gain at least a map of the terrain.
Defeasible Reasoning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Reasoning is defeasible when the corresponding argument is rationally compelling but not deductively valid. The truth of the premises of a good defeasible argument provide support for the conclusion, even though it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. In other words, the relationship of support between premises and conclusion is a tentative one, potentially defeated by additional information.
Touchstone Archives: The Skeptical Inquirer
Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.
That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.
Logical Fallacies in Psychology
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This fallacy takes the form of assuming that a group
possesses the characteristics of its individual members.
Example: "Several
years ago, a group of 10 psychologists started a psychology training program.
Each of those psychologists is efficient,
effective, and highly-regarded. Their training program must be efficient,
effective, and highly-regarded." -
The division fallacy or decomposition fallacy takes the
form of assuming that the members of a group posses the characteristics
of the group.
Example: "This clinic sure makes a lot of money. Each
of the psychologists who work there must earn a large income."
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Quantitative Literacy and Reasoning for Liberal Studies
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