Rationality

That sort of error is called “statistical bias.” When your method of learning about the world is biased, learning more may not help. Acquiring more data can even consistently worsen a biased prediction.

The conjunction fallacy is when humans rate the probability P(A,B) higher than the probability P(B),

A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

This is why rationalists put such a heavy premium on the paradoxical-seeming claim that a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise.

If what you believe doesn’t depend on what you see, you’ve been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.

Not all lies are uncovered, not all liars are punished. But the Great Web is very commonly underestimated. Just the knowledge that humans have already accumulated would take many human lifetimes to learn. Anyone who thinks that a non-God can tell a perfect lie, risk-free, is underestimating the tangledness of the Great Web.

When you’re buying a house, you don’t get exactly ten houses to choose from, and you aren’t led on a guided tour of all of them before you’re allowed to decide anything. You look at one house, and another, and compare them to each other; you adjust your aspirations—reconsider how much you really need to be close to your workplace and how much you’r

our tendency to assess phenomena by how representative they seem of various categories.

In 1951, a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton turned unusually rough. Psychologists Hastorf and Cantril asked students from each school who had started the rough play. Nearly all agreed that Princeton hadn’t started it; but 86% of Princeton students believed that Dartmouth had started it, whereas only 36% of Dartmouth students blamed Dar

A much more dramatic illustration was produced in followup experiments by Gilbert, Tafarodi, and Malone.2 Subjects read aloud crime reports crawling across a video monitor, in which the color of the text indicated whether a particular statement was true or false. Some reports contained false statements that exacerbated the severity of the crime, ot