If you want to practice reductive explanation and, before that, the dissolving/righting/making precise of questions, the All Souls exam has lots to offer.

Writes about phenomenal consciousness, belief and introspection.

Picoeconomics is a developing framework for the analysis of motivation and motivational conflict.

"Although people assume that their first guess about a matter of fact exhausts the best information available to them, a forced second guess contributes additional information, such that the average of two guesses is better than either guess alone."

Provides a precise language and graphic notation for analyzing decision making in the presence of uncertainty.

An amalgam of Hamilton’s rule and Pascal’s wager shows how natural selection can favour strategies that lead to frequent errors in attributing causality as long as the occasional correct response carries a large fitness benefit.

Jaynes argues that, as recently as 3000 years ago, human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man, and that neither part was consciously aware.

Traits shared by all human cultures, without known exceptions.

"We present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself."

Related to personal development, rationality and big cultural issues, but the only reason I'm bookmarking this is that it's so damn entertaining.

Daniel Gilbert: "Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed."

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change. If we only admit small local errors, we will only make small local changes. We could move so much faster.

The young know about the attitudes the old have on average toward marriage, careers, and so on. Young who do not acquire insight from this fact need to explain such age differences in differing preferences or abilities, rather than differing information.

Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic.

"What is the biggest thing you have ever changed your mind on, what is the deepest belief you held that you were wrong on?"

The accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians, chessplayers and athletes.

A situation in which every subsequent actor, based on the observations of others, makes the same choice independent of his/her private signal.

"Here we discuss common patterns of bias and self-deception, statistical and other formal analysis tools, computational and data-gathering aids, and social institutions which may discourage bias and encourage its correction."

To the young the old seem boring and conformist, while to the old the young seem lonely and flighty. Here's why.

Scary and common: Argument by selective reading, misunderstanding the nature of statistics, causal reductionism, excluded middle.

Considers the nature and plausibility of the pessimistic view of human rationality often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition.

Central thesis: All genuine revolutionary impulses and activities stem directly from the desires of individuals, not from any ideologically imposed sense of "duty" with its attendant guilt, self-sacrifice, and self-deadening "shoulds."

Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Psychology, Cognitive Science, ...

Wikibook-Project for students of the University of Osnabrück.

Each of our minds contains either meme complexes or complex functional adaptations which have evolved to identify “religious” thoughts and to neutralize their impact on our behavior.

Anthropic bias is a term coined by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, as an expression for the bias arising when "your evidence is biased by observation selection effects".

The tragedy of the commons is a phrase used to refer to a class of phenomena that involve a conflict for resources between individual interests and the common good.

Any group of people who have something in common, and who have their own mailing list, will naturally tend to form a clique unless specific steps are taken to avoid it.