Rationality

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation

Rather than judging our explanations by their predictive power, we tell stories to make sense of what we think we know.

When it rains, and you don’t know why, you have several options. First, you could simply not ask why—not follow up on the question, or never think of the question in the first place. This is the Ignore command, which the bearded wise man originally selected. Second, you could try to devise some sort of explanation, the Explain command, as the beard

A cognitive bias is a systematic way that your innate patterns of thought fall short of truth (or some other attainable goal, such as happiness).

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.