Comments on: Real Rationality

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Matt, epistemic rationality may be a subset of instrumental rationality, or it may be different, but naively confusing the two does nobody any favors.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:04:55 +0000

Bill, do you think that the current systems for deciding who should be heard on what are optimally managed?

By: Matt Fraser

Matt Fraser — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:12:22 +0000

This assumes that you care about being heard and making a difference. Personally these things make no difference to me; I just want to understand the world as much as I can. If it turns out that I come across a way of understanding it that is new and other people take notice of it then great!

By: David Smith

David Smith — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:59:29 +0000

I’m sympathetic to Bill’s point of view up above.

By: tom

tom — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:14:23 +0000

The missing link from my previous post:

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2009/12/the-groupthink-inside-your-head.html

By: tom

tom — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:13:38 +0000

Justoneminute had a good post on the first part of the subject–the small part of ourselves that we control. It’s about a metaphor likening us to a boy riding an elephant (except that we may not even know we are riding the elephant or that there is an elephant):

By: Divya

Divya — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:55:06 +0000

I had to read this post twice to understand what Robin meant

But, Robin, how to influence this organism? History does show the system can be influenced (women’s rights, green energy, equal rights for non-whites, human rights, etc). Is it just a matter of luck, or diligent ant work so that when “time is right” the opinion tilts?

(If you have written about it earlier, I am sorry to ask you to repeat!)

By: mjgeddes

mjgeddes — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:10:05 +0000

Lacking the information contained in the rest of your mind, you are vulnerable to bias. Generalizing to the rest of the world, lacking the information contained in all other minds, you are vulnerable to anthropic selection effects. Bias is just a special case of anthropics!

This was graphically illustrated in the Derren Brown episode on ‘The System’, where a member of the public was astonished to be receiving repeated correct predictions for horse racing, with the winning horses sometimes coming from impossible positions and getting astonishing good luck in the running. She was tricked by confiirmation bias because she only saw her own perspective. ‘Panning out’ to the wider ‘people-scape’ revealed the secret – anthropics – Derren was simultaneously sending tips to over 7000 people covering all possible combinations and weeding out the losers – only the film from the one remaining person that by chance received all the right tips was used.

That which controls the wider ‘system’ in which Bayes is embedded warps the probabilities by manipulating what other people see, this is the ‘killer’ flaw in Bayes.

By: ravi hegde

ravi hegde — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:49:34 +0000

The cognitive biases you see in individuals will not likely go completely away when you increase the scale. Although it will cancel out many biases, it will not be able to correct errors when and if the biases correlate. The errors are also likely to be severe in magnitude when and if they do occur. But I agree that a systematic study of cognitive biases in a group of agents who themselves have biases is important.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:20:27 +0000

Robin made a similar argument a while back at LessWrong: Rational Me or We? I'm also reminded of a point often made at Boettke's blog (formerly known as The Austrian Economists) about how Austrians should seek to get work published in high-impact non-Austrian journals so as to better spread Austrian ideas. Agent00yak, the same joke was already made by n/a at r/h/e notes. In fact, I suspect you stole the pun from him.