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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

A book which provides a good deal of evidence of these biases is Einstein's Luck: The Truth behind Some of the Greatest Scientific Discoveries by John Waller. Most people on this blog would mainly find it useful as evidence to convince skeptics rather than to improve their understanding of biases.Eliezer asks: "If tomorrow we found out that all Isaac Newton's discoveries were really made by his cleaning lady, how would the history of science change?"It would change what history says about the kind of personality that makes important discoveries (e.g. do they typically have Aspergers?). Which might affect, say, how we should go about identifying the person who will create the first AGI and thereby target arguments about AGI risks at him.Also, the difference between one hero and many incremental advances has some implications for the patent system, whose desirability is partly based on the assumption that the important inventors are typically identified.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

TGGP, I hadn't seen Stigler's Conjecture - thanks! See also this essay by Krugman on "Ricardo's Difficult Idea" mentioned at http://worthwhile.typepad.c...

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