"a collection of arguments and counter-arguments"

Michael Nielsen breaks down the basic idea into conditional statements and assigns a probability range to each statement.

"I think dead children should be used as a unit of currency."

Calibration exercise.

A slightly rationalist short story.

Hilarious.

A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.

"It is not about being stubborn, but rather actually seeing a different world. Consequently, it is not something that can be overcome by being more rational in any direct sense, since it is the inputs to the rational process which are flawed."

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.

The ability to substantially predict the future of morality would be a strong argument against morality changes being due to info we learn, just as the ability to predict future stock prices would argue against stock price changes being due to info.

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.

A slight preference for avoiding disagreement can result in the clumping together of groups with similar biases. Then, when all those you interact with have similar biases, it becomes very unlikely you will change your mind.

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

"People don't read the news because that it is useful; they read it to show how much they know and how well they can analyze it."

How good scientists reach bad conclusions.

"There must be an important flaw in our understanding of the structure of the universe and the range of development of civilizations, or in the process of anthropic reasoning."

"I don't know" is usually just a screen that people think is defensible and unarguable before they go on to do whatever they feel like, and it's usually the wrong thing because they refused to admit to themselves what their guess was [..].

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

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.

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.

Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.