Sublime

I suggested that one key to resisting an affective death spiral is the principle of “burdensome details”—just remembering to question the specific details of each additional nice claim about the Great Idea. (It’s not trivial advice. People often don’t remember to do this when they’re listening to a futurist sketching amazingly detailed projections

Definite optimism and constrained vision

In other words, be skeptical of yourself and of your own mind. Observe actively, going beyond the passivity that is our default state. Was something the result of an actual objective behavior (before you term Mary saintly, did you ever observe her doing something that would lead you to believe it?), or just a subjective impression (well, she looked

from quick feedback. When these favorable conditions are absent, we need to proceed more cautiously. Genuine expertise here requires going beyond gut feelings and relying more on simple estimates based on past data and explicit reasoning that can avoid the tempting bait-and-swap maneuver our intuition often uses to change a hard question into an ea

As Luke Muehlhauser writes, in The Power of Agency:11 You are not a Bayesian homunculus whose reasoning is “corrupted” by cognitive biases. You just are cognitive biases.