You might ask: Maybe the aliens do have a sense of humor, but you’re not telling funny enough jokes? This is roughly the equivalent of trying to speak English very loudly, and very slowly, in a foreign country, on the theory that those foreigners must have an inner ghost that can hear the meaning dripping from your words, inherent in your words, if

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

Above all, don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a

Epistemic rationality: systematically improving the accuracy of your beliefs.

Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience. Medical science can extrapolate what would happen to a human unprotected in a vacuum. Fiction can make you live through it.

The weighted mean of your expected posterior probability must equal your prior probability.

Conservation of Expected Evidence: The expectation of the posterior probability, after viewing the evidence, must equal the prior probability.

A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment.

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.