The Curious Engineer

Overcoming Bias

2008–2009

1,285 posts

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2009 494

December 2009

  1. Real Science
  2. Neutrality Isn’t Popular
  3. Smart Sincere Syndrome
  4. Docs vs MBAs
  5. World Government
  6. The Empire Bias
  7. Up In The Air
  8. Animal Smoking Studies
  9. Whence Scale Diseconomies?
  10. Smoking Trials Again
  11. Tiptoe Or Dash To Future?
  12. Long Legacies
  13. Meh Transhumanism
  14. Santa: Naughty Or Nice?
  15. Ho Hum Nuclear Winter
  16. China Ascendant
  17. Shoo Libertarian Knights
  18. Cheater Finder Fee?
  19. Why Read Old Thinkers?
  20. Naked Promiscuity
  21. Balance Blocks News Info
  22. Doubling Down On US Status
  23. Status Honesty
  24. Random Smoking Trials
  25. Football Decimation
  26. Aritists Need Not Be Nice
  27. Two Faces of Dreamtime
  28. “Oughts” Are Derived From “Is”
  29. Majoritarian Philosophy
  30. I Play Wonk at NYT
  31. Student Idealism
  32. Know Your Propaganda
  33. School Is Propaganda
  34. Less Reg = More Med
  35. Married Sex
  36. Microlending Fails
  37. Does Real = Feel?
  38. Comedy Is Cynical
  39. Feels Data Is In
  40. Privacy Is Far
  41. Date-Rape Drug Myth
  42. Wasted Cancer Hope
  43. OB Ads?
  44. Cosmic Clump Coincidence?
  45. Open Thread
  46. Hearts Vs. Heads

November 2009

  1. See “To Be”
  2. Philosophy Kills
  3. Panspermia Confirmed
  4. Hail The Unknown Explorer
  5. Make More Than GPA
  6. Bad Emulation Advance
  7. Parenting Is Not About Kids
  8. Conspiracies Confirmed
  9. Rah Price Manipulators
  10. Do Men Hurt More?
  11. Monogamy Is Human
  12. Academia Is Aging
  13. Status Quo Institution Bias
  14. Require Baby Paternity Test
  15. It’s News On Academia, Not Climate
  16. Byron vs. Wordsworth
  17. Smile Till It Hurts
  18. Praise Results
  19. Movies As Detached Detail
  20. Are You Pro Slavery?
  21. Execution Dignity
  22. Evolving Diverse Fragility
  23. Broken Symmetries
  24. Key Disputed Values
  25. Why Neglect Big Topics
  26. Contrarian Excuses
  27. Why Academics Aren’t Bayesian
  28. Humans Are Evolving
  29. Vegan Compromise
  30. What Status RQ?
  31. Tear Down This Wall
  32. Combo Prediction Markets Talk
  33. Caplan on Exposure Therapy
  34. Are Women Picky?
  35. Democracy Failings
  36. Beware Inward Apologetics
  37. Pretty Pols Win
  38. Pride Is About Status
  39. FDA Blunders
  40. Sports Signals
  41. Pondering Panspermia
  42. All Hail William Napier
  43. A Galactic Garden
  44. Inequality Is Down

October 2009

  1. Costumes And Identity
  2. Meetings As Flattery
  3. Farmers War
  4. Take Both Econ, Techies Seriously
  5. Beware Far Ethics
  6. Why Insider Trade Bans
  7. Georgetown Talk Today
  8. Missing Analogies
  9. Flu Shot Doubts
  10. Hide The Blood Money
  11. Could It Be That Easy?
  12. Bad News On Human Extinction
  13. The Right Questions
  14. Why Borg At Work, Not Home?
  15. Finance Profs Won’t Bet
  16. Beware Concept Intuitions
  17. Unequal Beauty Silence
  18. Power Beats Happiness
  19. What’s Pakistan’s Secret?
  20. Fertility Fall Still Puzzling
  21. Never Tell Me The Odds
  22. War From Near And Far
  23. Prefer Local Government
  24. What Is “Personal”?
  25. War Is Peace
  26. Med Decides If We’ll Get Richer
  27. Sex is Near, Love is Far
  28. Is Mass Transit Green?
  29. Let’s Not Kill All The Lawyers
  30. Prefer Law To Values
  31. Denying Dominance
  32. Fear of Near Death Thoughts
  33. Beware Book Learning
  34. Self Assured Destruction
  35. Disasters Are Worth Preventing
  36. In Praise Of Blackmail
  37. True Violence
  38. Open Thread
  39. Allowed Lies

September 2009

  1. For Doc Liability
  2. This is the Dream Time
  3. You Dislike Most Folks
  4. Explaining Unequal Inequality Aversion
  5. Poor Folks Do Smile
  6. The First Tech Bubble: 1720
  7. Thursday on Men’s Rights
  8. Future Fertility
  9. Income is Healthy, Not Earning, Spending It
  10. Limits To Growth
  11. The Sacrifice Trap
  12. Alas Shy Academics
  13. How Is Our Era Unique?
  14. Better Bill Scoring
  15. Walmart Med Is Better
  16. Height Puzzle
  17. Trust Puzzle
  18. There Is No Science
  19. Nature is Doomed
  20. The Dark Side of Cooperation
  21. Insurance As Signal
  22. What Do Nature Lovers Love?
  23. Gag Deals
  24. Painless Meat
  25. Catholic Girls
  26. Words Vs. Bets
  27. Obama’s Dreaming
  28. Just Beautiful
  29. Crazy Cones
  30. Against This Med Reform
  31. Alternate Free Speech Histories
  32. Seeing Red
  33. Prediction Markets As Collective Intelligence
  34. Ugly Thoughts On Pretty Enya
  35. For Med Free Speech
  36. Lost Charity
  37. Open Thread
  38. Disgust Works

August 2009

  1. Reliability Theory
  2. Our Nutrition Ignorance
  3. Cash Shy
  4. Today I’m 50
  5. Why Does Pharma Study Placebos?
  6. Tetlock Wisdom
  7. Pick One: Sick Kids or Look Poor
  8. Men Can Empathize, But Don’t
  9. Empathy Faces Are For Show
  10. What We Do When
  11. Singularity PR Dupes?
  12. Blogger Pots Call Senator Kettles Black
  13. Downturns Are Not Existential Risks
  14. Who Are US Policy Elites?
  15. A Test of Moral Progress
  16. Me in USA Today on SETI
  17. Klyde the Barbarian
  18. Tolstoy on Medicine
  19. Newer Best Game Theory
  20. The Confidence Heuristic
  21. Fiction And Females
  22. Lorentz Invariance, Not
  23. Social Brain Theory Confirmed
  24. Women Prefer Poaching
  25. Tax Investment
  26. Futarchy in BBC Focus Mag
  27. Indifference To Hospital Quality
  28. Moral Rules Are To Check Power
  29. Social Science Cuts Religiosity
  30. How Wrong Can We Be?
  31. Markets Stopped The Madness
  32. Actors See Status
  33. A Theory Of Identity
  34. What Purpose Self Insight?
  35. Blowhard Insight
  36. No Risk Premium?
  37. Shy And Badly Dressed
  38. Open Thread
  39. Brothel Bundles

July 2009

  1. Meds To Cut
  2. Fat Policy Is Not About Health
  3. Clinical Trial Sloppiness
  4. Are Juries About Guilt?
  5. Exposing Scientist Liberality
  6. Affirmative Action Isn’t About Uplift
  7. Who Will Fight Group Think?
  8. Social Collapse Vid
  9. Popular Fields Less Accurate
  10. The Meds In Spain Vary Mainly By The Plain
  11. Government Insurance Advantage?
  12. On The Origin Of Pigeons
  13. Medical Market Failures
  14. Reform Rate Signals
  15. Efficient Markets Confusion
  16. Media Scale Econ
  17. Fem Firm Finance
  18. Explain This Correlation
  19. Subsidize Investigative Journalism
  20. Beware Missing Signals
  21. How Exceptional Is Gelman?
  22. You Are A Character
  23. Conditional Love
  24. Language Drives Art
  25. Virtues of Policy Delay
  26. Academia’s Function
  27. Who Cares About Unsexy Men?
  28. 40% of US Moms Unwed
  29. How To Pop Bubbles
  30. What Are They Thinking?
  31. Simple Forecasts Best
  32. Do The Smart Help More?
  33. Stupider Than You Realize
  34. Improved Cores Unwanted
  35. Signaling Beats Race-IQ For Controversy
  36. I’m on MSNBC 9am EST
  37. War Is Brotherly

June 2009

  1. Why Not Home College?
  2. Redistribution Isn’t About Sympathy
  3. 8.3 Mortality Risk Ratio!
  4. What Conjunction Fallacy?
  5. How Fix Boards?
  6. Signals Are Forever
  7. Space Storm Insurance
  8. The Best Big Lies?
  9. Obama’s Opportunity Cost
  10. For The Truth, Ask Friends
  11. Why Signals Are Shallow
  12. Over The Top Commencement
  13. Blame Games
  14. Errors, Lies, and Self-Deception
  15. “Lazy” Hurt Less Than “Stupid”?
  16. Tyler Dares Obama
  17. Growth Mode Jump Example
  18. Space Towers
  19. Why Yes Men
  20. Kid Care Need Only Be Fun
  21. Remember The HMO Revolution
  22. Reply to Clarke
  23. Satisfied with Status Affiliation
  24. Defending Mankiw
  25. Pro “Slavery” OpEd
  26. Slow Potatos
  27. What Voting Signals
  28. What Chance a “Real” Possibility?
  29. Gullible Mimics
  30. Municipalize Medicine?
  31. Open Thread

May 2009

  1. Sweat Intuition
  2. CO2 Warming Looks Real
  3. Reply to Caplan
  4. Minimal Morality
  5. Political Signaling Theories
  6. Reply to Wilkinson
  7. Wilkinson on Side Effects
  8. Reinventing Idea Futures
  9. Reply to Gelman
  10. Just A Handshake
  11. Moving Hiatus
  12. Tax Unhappiness?
  13. Missing Liberaltarians
  14. Reply to Moldbug
  15. Against Admirable Activities, Again
  16. Gottschall’s Gotcha
  17. Spent = Gold + Schlock
  18. Spent‘s Main Argument
  19. Against Makeup?
  20. Mea Culpa: Positionality Data
  21. Luxury Fever
  22. Capitas Vs. Per Capita
  23. Animal Morality
  24. Near Far In Science Fiction
  25. Econ Neglects Licensing
  26. Desert Errors
  27. Ignoring Betrayal
  28. Tropes Are Treasures
  29. Pretending To Be What You Are
  30. The Growth Groove Game
  31. We Like Pride
  32. Engagement Swaps
  33. Prefer Peace
  34. Toward Honest Ideals
  35. Far Thoughts Fit Ideals
  36. Generous Lust
  37. Cloud Seeding Works
  38. Open Thread

April 2009

  1. Pox On Both Houses
  2. You Don’t Know Why You Act
  3. Beware Panic Panic
  4. Female Orgasm as Screening
  5. Prestige Matters More For Smarts
  6. Meta Institutions
  7. Less Wrong: Progress Report
  8. Why Refuse To Debate
  9. Wisdom of Rhode
  10. Score Your Beliefs
  11. NYC Meetup Friday 7pm
  12. Telephone Game With Functions
  13. Future Incompetence
  14. Ignorance About Intuitions
  15. Rarity Anomalies Remain
  16. Morals From Stories?
  17. Efficient Economist’s Pledge
  18. Fake Grammar Experts
  19. Home-Based Group Insurance
  20. On Liberty vs. Efficiency
  21. Comedic Actors Slighted?
  22. Rational Paranoia
  23. Who Loves Truth Most?
  24. Caplan-Hanson Debate Tuesday
  25. Self-Haters Donate More
  26. 911 Puzzling
  27. Talk Is Not About Info
  28. Haters Cheat Less
  29. Seek Superstar Slavery
  30. The what-pisses-you-off heuristic
  31. Silly Consensus
  32. Choke To Submit?
  33. Medical Ideology
  34. Another Call to End Aid to Africa
  35. Incentives, Allies Cut Bias
  36. Faith In Breasts
  37. Wrong Tomorrow
  38. Open Thread
  39. How Spend Rationality Test?

March 2009

  1. When Eyes Weigh
  2. Missing Alliances
  3. Past Hypothesis Taxonomy
  4. Scandalous Heat
  5. I’ll Be Different
  6. Echo Chamber Confidence
  7. Reveal Rejects?
  8. College Prestige Lies
  9. Signaling in Economics
  10. BSG is Detached Detail
  11. Minchin’s Mistake
  12. New Tech Signals
  13. Toddlers Avoid Dissenters
  14. The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
  15. Break Cryonics Down
  16. My Cryonics Hour
  17. My BHTV with Tyler Cowen
  18. Yes, Tax Lax Ideas
  19. Trusting Sponsored Medical Research
  20. Kid’s Rights
  21. Status Prudes
  22. More Getting Froze
  23. Wishful Dreaming
  24. Who Likes Band Music?
  25. Loving Cranks to Death
  26. As ye judge those who fund thee, ye shall be judged
  27. Evaporated Cane Juice
  28. Be sure to mind when you change your mind
  29. Posting now enabled on Less Wrong
  30. Lying With Style
  31. Question Medical Findings
  32. Six Months Later
  33. What Changed?
  34. Status Affiliation Puzzles
  35. OB meetup Friday 13th 7PM Springfield VA
  36. Augustine’s Paradox of optimal repentance
  37. Open Thread
  38. Near-Far Like Drunk Darts?

February 2009

  1. The Most Frequently Useful Thing
  2. The Most Important Thing You Learned
  3. Avoid Identifying With Anything?
  4. Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story… at Less Wrong
  5. What is Gossip For?
  6. Markets are Anti-Inductive
  7. Libel, Slander, Blackmail
  8. Formative Youth
  9. What Do Schools Sell?
  10. On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan
  11. Who Are Macro Experts?
  12. What is Medical Quality?
  13. Fairness vs. Goodness
  14. Rationality Quotes 27
  15. Write Your Hypothetical Apostasy
  16. Wise Pretensions v.0
  17. Pretending to be Wise
  18. Spotty Deference
  19. The intervention and the checklist: two paradigms for improvement
  20. Against Maturity
  21. Good Idealistic Books are Rare
  22. Seeking A Cynic’s Library
  23. Cynical About Cynicism
  24. Beware Value Talk
  25. An African Folktale
  26. Rationality Quotes 26
  27. An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
  28. The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary
  29. Beware Ideal Screen Theories
  30. Signaling Math
  31. Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)
  32. Informers and Persuaders
  33. Against Propaganda
  34. (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
  35. …And Say No More Of It
  36. The Thing That I Protect
  37. Our Biggest Surprise
  38. Epilogue: Atonement (8/8)
  39. Share likelihood ratios, not posterior beliefs
  40. True Ending: Sacrificial Fire (7/8)
  41. Conscious Control
  42. Normal Ending: Last Tears (6/8)
  43. Lying Stimuli
  44. Three Worlds Decide (5/8)
  45. Thoughtful Music
  46. Interlude with the Confessor (4/8)
  47. Open Thread
  48. The Super Happy People (3/8)

January 2009

  1. War and/or Peace (2/8)
  2. The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)
  3. Three Worlds Collide (0/8)
  4. Dreams as Evidence
  5. Academic Ideals
  6. Value is Fragile
  7. Roberts’ Bias Therapy
  8. Rationality Quotes 25
  9. Different meanings of Bayesian statistics
  10. OB Status Update
  11. 31 Laws of Fun
  12. BHTV: Yudkowsky / Wilkinson
  13. The Fun Theory Sequence
  14. Avoid Vena Cava Filters
  15. Rationality Quotes 24
  16. Higher Purpose
  17. Investing for the Long Slump
  18. Tribal Biases and the Inauguration
  19. Who Likes What Movies
  20. Failed Utopia #4-2
  21. Sunnyvale Meetup Saturday
  22. Set Obama’s Bar
  23. Interpersonal Entanglement
  24. Predictible Fakers
  25. Sympathetic Minds
  26. The surprising power of rote cognition
  27. In Praise of Boredom
  28. Beware Detached Detail
  29. Getting Nearer
  30. A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
  31. Seduced by Imagination
  32. Data On Fictional Lies
  33. Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises
  34. Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias
  35. She has joined the Conspiracy
  36. Building Weirdtopia
  37. Eutopia is Scary
  38. Bad News Predictor Jailed
  39. Continuous Improvement
  40. Why We Like Middle Options, Small Menus
  41. Rationality Quotes 23
  42. Serious Stories
  43. Why Love Is Vague
  44. Rationality Quotes 22
  45. Free Docs Not Help Poor Kids
  46. Emotional Involvement
  47. Why Fiction Lies
  48. Rationality Quotes 21
  49. Changing Emotions
  50. Growing Up is Hard
  51. A World Without Lies?
  52. The Uses of Fun (Theory)
  53. Status-Biased Morality
  54. Open Thread
  55. Disagreeing About Doubt
  56. Free to Optimize
  57. Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?

2008 791

December 2008

  1. A New Day
  2. Against Interesting Details
  3. Dunbar’s Function
  4. Amputation of Destiny
  5. The Meta-Human Condition
  6. “It is Simply No Longer Possible to Believe”
  7. Friendship is Relative
  8. Can’t Unbirth a Child
  9. Nonsentient Bloggers
  10. Nonsentient Optimizers
  11. Nonperson Predicates
  12. Alien Bad Guy Bias
  13. Devil’s Offers
  14. Harmful Options
  15. The Longshot Bias
  16. Imaginary Positions
  17. Coherent Futures
  18. Rationality Quotes 20
  19. No Overconfidence?
  20. Show-Off Bias
  21. Living By Your Own Strength
  22. Sensual Experience
  23. Presuming Bets are Bad
  24. ‘Futarchy’ is NYT Buzzword of ’08
  25. Experts Are For Certainty
  26. Complex Novelty
  27. High Challenge
  28. Weak Social Theories
  29. Christmas Signaling
  30. Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
  31. The Right Thing
  32. Who Cheers The Referee?
  33. Visualizing Eutopia
  34. I’ll Think of a Reason Later
  35. Tyler on Cryonics
  36. Not Taking Over the World
  37. Entrepreneurs Are Not Overconfident
  38. Distrusting Drama
  39. For The People Who Are Still Alive
  40. Trade With The Future
  41. BHTV: de Grey and Yudkowsky
  42. Hated Because It Might Work
  43. Cryonics Is Cool
  44. You Only Live Twice
  45. We Agree: Get Froze
  46. What I Think, If Not Why
  47. What Core Argument?
  48. The linear-scaling error
  49. The Mechanics of Disagreement
  50. Two Visions Of Heritage
  51. Bay Area Meetup Wed 12/10 @8pm
  52. Are AIs Homo Economicus?
  53. Disjunctions, Antipredictions, Etc.
  54. The Bad Guy Bias
  55. True Sources of Disagreement
  56. US TV Censorship
  57. Wrapping Up
  58. Artificial Mysterious Intelligence
  59. False false dichotomies
  60. Shared AI Wins
  61. Is That Your True Rejection?
  62. Friendly Projects vs. Products
  63. Sustained Strong Recursion
  64. Evolved Desires
  65. Gas Arbitrage
  66. Drexler Blogs!
  67. Beware Hockey Stick Plans
  68. Underconstrained Abstractions
  69. Rationality of voting etc.
  70. Permitted Possibilities, & Locality
  71. The Hypocrisy-Charge Bias
  72. Test Near, Apply Far
  73. Hard Takeoff
  74. Voting Kills
  75. Whither Manufacturing?
  76. Recursive Self-Improvement
  77. Open Thread
  78. I Heart CYC
  79. Disappointment in the Future
  80. Stuck In Throat

November 2008

  1. Singletons Rule OK
  2. Total Tech Wars
  3. Chaotic Inversion
  4. Luck Pessimism
  5. Thanksgiving Prayer
  6. Dreams of Autarky
  7. Modern Depressions
  8. Total Nano Domination
  9. Beliefs Require Reasons, or: Is the Pope Catholic? Should he be?
  10. Engelbart: Insufficiently Recursive
  11. Abstract/Distant Future Bias
  12. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ad Hominem
  13. Physicists Held To Lower Standard
  14. Thinking Helps
  15. …Recursion, Magic
  16. When Life Is Cheap, Death Is Cheap
  17. Polisci Stats Biased
  18. Cascades, Cycles, Insight…
  19. “Evicting” brain emulations
  20. Are you dreaming?
  21. Surprised by Brains
  22. Billion Dollar Bots
  23. Brain Emulation and Hard Takeoff
  24. Emulations Go Foom
  25. Life’s Story Continues
  26. Observing Optimization
  27. AI Go Foom
  28. Whence Your Abstractions?
  29. Abstraction, Not Analogy
  30. The First World Takeover
  31. Setting The Stage
  32. Cheap Wine Tastes Fine
  33. Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?
  34. The Weak Inside View
  35. Loud Subtext
  36. Convenient Overconfidence
  37. Failure By Affective Analogy
  38. Failure By Analogy
  39. Whither OB?
  40. All Are Skill Unaware
  41. Logical or Connectionist AI?
  42. Friendliness Factors
  43. Boston-area Meetup: 11/18/08 9pm MIT/Cambridge
  44. Positive vs. Optimal
  45. Friendly Teams
  46. The Nature of Logic
  47. Diamond Palace Survive?
  48. Selling Nonapples
  49. Engelbart As UberTool?
  50. The Weighted Majority Algorithm
  51. Fund UberTool?
  52. Worse Than Random
  53. Conformity Shows Loyalty
  54. Lawful Uncertainty
  55. What Belief Conformity?
  56. Ask OB: Leaving the Fold
  57. Depressed Not More Accurate
  58. Lawful Creativity
  59. Visionary News
  60. Recognizing Intelligence
  61. Equal Cheats
  62. Back Up and Ask Whether, Not Why
  63. Beware “I Believe”
  64. Hanging Out My Speaker’s Shingle
  65. Disagreement Debate Status?
  66. Beware the Prescient
  67. Today’s Inspirational Tale
  68. The Evil Pleasure
  69. Complexity and Intelligence
  70. Building Something Smarter
  71. Open Thread
  72. BHTV: Jaron Lanier and Yudkowsky

October 2008

  1. Mundane Magic
  2. FHI Emulation Roadmap Out
  3. Porn vs Romance Novels
  4. Intelligence in Economics
  5. Does Intelligence Float?
  6. Economic Definition of Intelligence?
  7. Anti-Edgy
  8. Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization
  9. Wanting To Want
  10. Measuring Optimization Power
  11. Transparent Characters
  12. Aiming at the Target
  13. Trust Us!
  14. Belief in Intelligence
  15. Expected Creative Surprises
  16. Trust But Don’t Verify
  17. San Jose Meetup, Sat 10/25 @ 7:30pm
  18. Inner Goodness
  19. Obama Donors As News
  20. Which Parts Are “Me”?
  21. If You Snooze, You Lose
  22. Ethics Notes
  23. Howard Stern on Voter Rationalization
  24. Prices or Bindings?
  25. Toilets Aren’t About Not Dying of Disease
  26. Ethical Injunctions
  27. Informed Voters Choose Worse
  28. Ethical Inhibitions
  29. Protected From Myself
  30. Last Post Requests?
  31. Dark Side Epistemology
  32. Preventive Health Care
  33. Traditional Capitalist Values
  34. US Help Red China Revolt?
  35. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
  36. Conspiracy’s Uncanny Valley
  37. Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)
  38. Why Voter Drives
  39. Election Gambling History
  40. Why Does Power Corrupt?
  41. Behold Our Ancestors
  42. Rationality Quotes 19
  43. Grateful For Bad News
  44. The Ritual
  45. Crisis of Faith
  46. The Wire
  47. AIs and Gatekeepers Unite!
  48. Bad Faith Voter Drives
  49. Shut up and do the impossible!
  50. Academics in Clown Suits
  51. Gullibility and Control
  52. Terror Politics Isn’t About Policy
  53. Make an Extraordinary Effort
  54. More Deafening Silence
  55. On Doing the Impossible
  56. Insincere Cheers
  57. My Bayesian Enlightenment
  58. Political Harassment
  59. Beyond the Reach of God
  60. Rationality Quotes 18
  61. Equally Shallow Genders
  62. Open Thread
  63. Political Parties are not about Policy
  64. Use the Try Harder, Luke
  65. No Rose-Colored Dating Glasses
  66. Trying to Try
  67. Intrade and the Dow Drop
  68. Awww, a Zebra

September 2008

  1. The Magnitude of His Own Folly
  2. The Hope Premium
  3. Dangerous Species Warnings
  4. Friedman’s “Prediction vs. Explanation”
  5. Above-Average AI Scientists
  6. Competent Elites
  7. Bank Politics Is Not About Bank Policy
  8. The Level Above Mine
  9. Doable Green
  10. Give it to Me Straight! I Swear I Won’t be Mad!
  11. My Naturalistic Awakening
  12. Pundits As Moles
  13. Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth
  14. White Swans Painted Black
  15. Correcting Biases Once You’ve Identified Them
  16. That Tiny Note of Discord
  17. Noble Lies?
  18. Horrible LHC Inconsistency
  19. Politics isn’t about Policy
  20. How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?
  21. Ban the Bear
  22. Say It Loud
  23. Bad News Ban Is Very Bad News
  24. Overconfidence is Stylish
  25. The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth
  26. Who To Blame
  27. A Prodigy of Refutation
  28. Money Is Serious
  29. Raised in Technophilia
  30. Deafening Silence
  31. My Best and Worst Mistake
  32. Noble Abstention
  33. My Childhood Death Spiral
  34. Serious Music
  35. Optimization
  36. Beware High Standards
  37. Psychic Powers
  38. Immodest Caplan
  39. Excluding the Supernatural
  40. Intelligent Design Honesty
  41. Rationality Quotes 17
  42. Election Review Articles
  43. Points of Departure
  44. Guiltless Victims
  45. Singularity Summit 2008
  46. ‘Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a t**t.’
  47. Is Carbon Lost Cause?
  48. Rationality Quotes 16
  49. Aaronson on Singularity
  50. Rationality Quotes 15
  51. Hating Economists
  52. Rationality Quotes 14
  53. Disagreement is Disrespect
  54. The Truly Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
  55. Aping Insight
  56. The True Prisoner’s Dilemma
  57. Mirrored Lives
  58. Risk is Physical
  59. Rationality Quotes 12
  60. Open Thread

August 2008

  1. Brief Break
  2. Dreams of Friendliness
  3. Fake Fish
  4. Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
  5. Cowen-Hanson Bloggingheads Topics?
  6. Moral False Consensus
  7. Harder Choices Matter Less
  8. The Complexity Critique
  9. Against Modal Logics
  10. Top Teachers Ineffective
  11. Dreams of AI Design
  12. Top Docs No Healthier
  13. Three Fallacies of Teleology
  14. Use the Native Architecture
  15. Cowen Disses Futarchy
  16. Magical Categories
  17. Randomised Controlled Trials of Parachutes
  18. Unnatural Categories
  19. Good Medicine in Merry Old England
  20. Mirrors and Paintings
  21. Beauty Bias
  22. Invisible Frameworks
  23. Dark Dreams
  24. No License To Be Human
  25. Are UFOs Aliens?
  26. You Provably Can’t Trust Yourself
  27. Caplan Gums Bullet
  28. Dumb Deplaning
  29. Mundane Dishonesty
  30. The Cartoon Guide to Löb’s Theorem
  31. Bias in Real Life: A Personal Story
  32. When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid
  33. Hot Air Doesn’t Disagree
  34. Manipulators as Mirrors
  35. The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
  36. Is Fairness Arbitrary?
  37. Self-Indication Solves Time-Asymmetry
  38. Schelling and the Nuclear Taboo
  39. “Arbitrary”
  40. New Best Game Theory
  41. Abstracted Idealized Dynamics
  42. Future Altruism, Not
  43. Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
  44. Doctor, There are Two Kinds of “No Evidence”
  45. Suspiciously Vague LHC Forecasts
  46. Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps
  47. The Problem at the Heart of Pascal’s Wager
  48. Inseparably Right; or, Joy in the Merely Good
  49. Baxter’s Flood
  50. Morality as Fixed Computation
  51. Our Comet Ancestors?
  52. Hiroshima Day
  53. The Robot’s Rebellion
  54. Yudkowsky’s Book
  55. Ignore Prostate Cancer
  56. Contaminated by Optimism
  57. Anthropology Patrons
  58. Anthropomorphic Optimism
  59. Now I’m Scared
  60. Incomplete Analysis
  61. No Logical Positivist I
  62. Bias against some types of foreign wives
  63. Where Does Pascal’s Wager Fail?
  64. About the Future of Humanity Institute
  65. The Comedy of Behaviorism
  66. Variance-Induced Test Bias
  67. A Genius for Destruction
  68. Open Thread

July 2008

  1. Detached Lever Fallacy
  2. OK, Now I’m Worried
  3. Humans in Funny Suits
  4. Touching Vs. Understanding
  5. Intrade’s Conditional Prediction Markets
  6. Interpersonal Morality
  7. The Meaning of Right
  8. Funding Bias
  9. Setting Up Metaethics
  10. Bias Against the Unseen
  11. Changing Your Metaethics
  12. Is Ideology About Status?
  13. Gary Taubes, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”
  14. Does Your Morality Care What You Think?
  15. Refuge Markets
  16. Math is Subjunctively Objective
  17. Can Counterfactuals Be True?
  18. When (Not) To Use Probabilities
  19. Banning Bad News
  20. Fake Norms, or “Truth” vs. Truth
  21. Loving Loyalty
  22. Should We Ban Physics?
  23. Touching the Old
  24. Existential Angst Factory
  25. Corporate Assassins
  26. Could Anything Be Right?
  27. Disaster Bias
  28. The Gift We Give To Tomorrow
  29. World Welfare State
  30. Whither Moral Progress?
  31. Posting May Slow
  32. Bias in Political Conversation
  33. Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Fiction
  34. Fear, God, and State
  35. Probability is Subjectively Objective
  36. Rebelling Within Nature
  37. Ask For Help
  38. Fundamental Doubts
  39. Biases of Elite Education
  40. The Genetic Fallacy
  41. My Kind of Reflection
  42. Helsinki Meetup
  43. Poker Vs Chess
  44. Cloud Seeding Markets
  45. The Fear of Common Knowledge
  46. Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
  47. Artificial Volcanoes
  48. CFTC Event Market Comment
  49. Will As Thou Wilt
  50. All Hail Info Theory
  51. BloggingHeads Hanson & Wilkinson
  52. Is Morality Given?
  53. Is Morality Preference?
  54. Rah My Country
  55. Moral Complexities
  56. 2 of 10, not 3 total
  57. Overconfident Investing
  58. The Bedrock of Fairness
  59. Sex, Nerds, and Entitlement
  60. Break It Down
  61. Why Argue Values?
  62. I’d take it
  63. Distraction Overcomes Moral Hypocrisy
  64. Open Thread
  65. Overcoming Our Vs. Others’ Biases
  66. Created Already In Motion

June 2008

  1. Experience Increases Overconfidence
  2. The Moral Void
  3. What Would You Do Without Morality?
  4. Average Your Guesses
  5. The Opposite Sex
  6. The Conversation So Far
  7. Glory vs. Relations
  8. 2-Place and 1-Place Words
  9. Caution Kills When Fighting Malaria
  10. To What Expose Kids?
  11. No Universally Compelling Arguments
  12. The Design Space of Minds-In-General
  13. Should Bad Boys Win?
  14. The Psychological Unity of Humankind
  15. Eliezer’s Meta-Level Determinism
  16. Optimization and the Singularity
  17. Tyler Vid on Disagreement
  18. Are Meta Views Outside Views?
  19. Surface Analogies and Deep Causes
  20. Parsing The Parable
  21. The Outside View’s Domain
  22. Outside View of Singularity
  23. Heading Toward Morality
  24. LA-602 vs. RHIC Review
  25. History of Transition Inequality
  26. Britain Was Too Small
  27. Natural Genocide
  28. What is the probability of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the universe?
  29. Ghosts in the Machine
  30. Gratitude Decay
  31. Loud Bumpers
  32. Grasping Slippery Things
  33. In Bias, Meta is Max
  34. Passing the Recursive Buck
  35. In Innovation, Meta is Max
  36. The Ultimate Source
  37. Possibility and Could-ness
  38. Joe Epstein on Youth
  39. Causality and Moral Responsibility
  40. Anti-Depressants Fail
  41. Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity
  42. And the Winner is… Many-Worlds!
  43. Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious
  44. An Intuitive Explanation of Quantum Mechanics
  45. Prediction Market Based Electoral Map Forecast
  46. TV is Porn
  47. The Quantum Physics Sequence
  48. Never Is A Long Time
  49. Eliezer’s Post Dependencies; Book Notification; Graphic Designer Wanted
  50. Anti-Foreign Bias
  51. Against Devil’s Advocacy
  52. The Future of Oil Prices 3: Nonrenewable Resource Pricing
  53. Meetup in NYC Wed?
  54. How Honest With Kids?
  55. Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Horgan
  56. Oil Scapegoats
  57. Timeless Control
  58. How to Add 2% to GDP
  59. Thou Art Physics
  60. Overcoming Disagreement
  61. Living in Many Worlds
  62. Wait For It
  63. Why Quantum?
  64. Against Disclaimers
  65. Timeless Identity
  66. Exploration As Status
  67. Principles of Disagreement
  68. The Rhythm of Disagreement
  69. Open Thread
  70. Singularity Economics

May 2008

  1. A Premature Word on AI
  2. A.I. Old-Timers
  3. Empty Space
  4. Class Project
  5. Einstein’s Superpowers
  6. Intro to Innovation
  7. Timeless Causality
  8. Overconfidence & Paternalism
  9. Timeless Beauty
  10. Lazy Lineup Study
  11. Timeless Physics
  12. 2nd Annual Roberts Podcast
  13. Who Shall We Honor?
  14. Relative Configuration Space
  15. Beware Identity
  16. A Broken Koan
  17. Mach’s Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics
  18. Lying to Kids
  19. My Childhood Role Model
  20. That Alien Message
  21. Anthropic Breakthrough
  22. Einstein’s Speed
  23. Transcend Or Die
  24. Far Future Disagreement
  25. Faster Than Science
  26. Conference on Global Catastrophic Risks
  27. Biting Evolution Bullets
  28. Changing the Definition of Science
  29. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
  30. Bounty Slander
  31. Idea Futures In Lumpaland
  32. Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?
  33. Lobbying for Prediction Markets
  34. Science Isn’t Strict Enough
  35. Lumpaland Parable
  36. When Science Can’t Help
  37. Honest Politics
  38. Science Doesn’t Trust Your Rationality
  39. Sleepy Fools
  40. The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
  41. The Failures of Eld Science
  42. Condemned to Repeat Finance Past
  43. Many Worlds, One Best Guess
  44. Happy Conservatives
  45. If Many-Worlds Had Come First
  46. Elusive Placebos
  47. Collapse Postulates
  48. Faith in Docs
  49. Quantum Non-Realism
  50. Expelled Beats Sicko
  51. Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable
  52. Guilt By Association
  53. Decoherence is Simple
  54. Keeping Math Real
  55. Spooky Action at a Distance: The No-Communication Theorem
  56. Walking On Grass, Others
  57. Bell’s Theorem: No EPR “Reality”
  58. Beware Transfusions
  59. Entangled Photons
  60. Beware Supplements
  61. Decoherence as Projection
  62. Open Thread
  63. I’m in Boston
  64. The Born Probabilities

April 2008

  1. Be biased to be happy
  2. Optimism Bias Desired
  3. Decoherent Essences
  4. Self-Copying Factories
  5. Decoherence is Pointless
  6. Charm Beats Accuracy
  7. The Conscious Sorites Paradox
  8. On Being Decoherent
  9. Quantum Orthodoxy
  10. If I Had A Million
  11. Where Experience Confuses Physicists
  12. Blaming The Unlucky
  13. Where Physics Meets Experience
  14. Early Scientists Chose Influence Over Credit
  15. Which Basis Is More Fundamental?
  16. A Model Disagreement
  17. The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
  18. Caplan Pulls Along Ropes
  19. Decoherence
  20. Paternalism Parable
  21. Three Dialogues on Identity
  22. On Philosophers
  23. Zombies: The Movie
  24. Schwitzgebel Thoughts
  25. Identity Isn’t In Specific Atoms
  26. Elevator Myths
  27. No Individual Particles
  28. Is She Just Friendly?
  29. Feynman Paths
  30. Kids, Parents Disagree on Spouses
  31. The Quantum Arena
  32. Classical Configuration Spaces
  33. How To Vs. What To
  34. Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?
  35. Naming Beliefs
  36. Where Philosophy Meets Science
  37. Distinct Configurations
  38. Conformity Questions
  39. Conformity Myths
  40. Joint Configurations
  41. Configurations and Amplitude
  42. Prevention Costs
  43. Quantum Explanations
  44. Inhuman Rationality?
  45. Belief in the Implied Invisible
  46. Endearing Sincerity
  47. GAZP vs. GLUT
  48. The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
  49. Anxiety about what is true
  50. Ramone on Knowing God
  51. Zombie Responses
  52. Brownlee on Selling Anxiety
  53. Zombies! Zombies?
  54. Reductive Reference
  55. Arbitrary Silliness
  56. Brain Breakthrough! It’s Made of Neurons!
  57. Open Thread
  58. Beware of Brain Images
  59. Heat vs. Motion

March 2008

  1. Against News
  2. Angry Atoms
  3. Hand vs. Fingers
  4. Impotence of Belief in Bias
  5. Initiation Ceremony
  6. Cash Increases Accuracy
  7. To Spread Science, Keep It Secret
  8. Ancient Political Self-Deception
  9. Scarcity
  10. Fantasy and Reality: Substitutes or Complements?
  11. Is Humanism A Religion-Substitute?
  12. Showing That You Care
  13. Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
  14. Religious Cohesion
  15. The Beauty of Settled Science
  16. Where Want Fewer Women?
  17. New York OB Meetup (ad-hoc) on Monday, Mar 24, @6pm
  18. If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
  19. Biases in Processing Political Information
  20. Bind Yourself to Reality
  21. Boards of Advisors Don’t Advise, Do Board
  22. Joy in Discovery
  23. Joy in the Merely Real
  24. Sincerity Is Overrated
  25. Savanna Poets
  26. Biases and Investing
  27. Morality Is Overrated
  28. Fake Reductionism
  29. They’re Only Tokens
  30. Explaining vs. Explaining Away
  31. Reductionism
  32. A Few Quick Links
  33. Qualitatively Confused
  34. The Kind of Project To Watch
  35. Penguicon & Blook
  36. One Million Visits
  37. Distinguish Info, Analysis, Belief, Action
  38. The Quotation is not the Referent
  39. Neglecting Conceptual Research
  40. Probability is in the Mind
  41. Limits to Physics Insight
  42. Mind Projection Fallacy
  43. Uninformative Experience
  44. Righting a Wrong Question
  45. Wrong Questions
  46. Dissolving the Question
  47. Bias And Power
  48. Gary Gygax Annihilated at 69
  49. Wilkinson on Paternalism
  50. 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
  51. Overvaluing Ideas
  52. Reject Random Beliefs
  53. Variable Question Fallacies
  54. Human Capital “Puzzle” Explained?
  55. Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
  56. Open Thread
  57. Framing problems as separate from people
  58. Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes

February 2008

  1. Searching for Bayes-Structure
  2. Perpetual Motion Beliefs
  3. Ignoring Advice
  4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
  5. Leave a Line of Retreat
  6. More Referee Bias
  7. Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words
  8. My Favorite Liar
  9. Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace
  10. If Self-Fulfilling Optimism is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna be Right
  11. Entropy, and Short Codes
  12. More Moral Wiggle Room
  13. Where to Draw the Boundary?
  14. The Hawthorne Effect
  15. Arguing “By Definition”
  16. Against Polish
  17. Colorful Character Again
  18. Sneaking in Connotations
  19. Nephew Versus Nepal Charity
  20. Categorizing Has Consequences
  21. The Public Intellectual Plunge
  22. Fallacies of Compression
  23. With blame comes hope
  24. Relative vs. Absolute Rationality
  25. Replace the Symbol with the Substance
  26. Talking Versus Trading
  27. Taboo Your Words
  28. Why “Just Believe”?
  29. Classic Sichuan in Millbrae, Thu Feb 21, 7pm
  30. Empty Labels
  31. Is Love Something More?
  32. The Argument from Common Usage
  33. Pod People Paternalism
  34. Feel the Meaning
  35. Dinos on the Moon
  36. Disputing Definitions
  37. What is Worth Study?
  38. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside
  39. Nanotech Views Value Driven
  40. Neural Categories
  41. Believing Too Little
  42. Disguised Queries
  43. Eternal Medicine
  44. The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
  45. Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
  46. What Wisdom Silence?
  47. Similarity Clusters
  48. Buy Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace
  49. Extensions and Intensions
  50. Let’s Do Like Them
  51. Words as Hidden Inferences
  52. Predictocracy vs. Futarchy
  53. The Parable of Hemlock
  54. Merger Decision Markets
  55. Open Thread
  56. The Parable of the Dagger
  57. Futarchy vs. Predictocracy

January 2008

  1. OB Meetup: Millbrae, Thu 21 Feb, 7pm
  2. Newcomb’s Problem and Regret of Rationality
  3. Dark Police
  4. Contingent Truth Value
  5. Deliberative Prediction Markets — A Reply
  6. Something to Protect
  7. Deliberation in Prediction Markets
  8. Trust in Bayes
  9. Predictocracy — A Preliminary Response
  10. The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
  11. Voters Want Simplicity
  12. Predictocracy
  13. Rationality Quotes 9
  14. Knowing your argumentative limitations, OR “one [rationalist’s] modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.”
  15. Problems With Prizes
  16. Rationality Quotes 8
  17. Acceptable Casualties
  18. Rationality Quotes 7
  19. CFO Overconfidence
  20. Rationality Quotes 6
  21. Rationality Quotes 5
  22. Connections Versus Insight
  23. Circular Altruism
  24. For Discount Rates
  25. Against Discount Rates
  26. Allais Malaise
  27. Mandatory Sensitivity Training Fails
  28. Rationality Quotes 4
  29. Zut Allais!
  30. The Allais Paradox
  31. Nesse on Academia
  32. Antidepressant Publication Bias
  33. Rationality Quotes 2
  34. Just Enough Expertise?
  35. Rationality Quotes 1
  36. Trust in Math
  37. Economist As Scrooge
  38. Beautiful Probability
  39. Leading bias researcher turns out to be… biased, renounces result
  40. Is Reality Ugly?
  41. Don’t Choose a President the Way You’d Choose an Assistant Regional Manager
  42. Expecting Beauty
  43. How To Fix Wage Bias
  44. Beautiful Math
  45. 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
  46. Once More, With Feeling
  47. Political Inequality
  48. Infinite Certainty
  49. More Presidential Decision Markets!
  50. Experiencing The Endowment Effect
  51. Absolute Authority
  52. Social Scientists Know Lots
  53. The Fallacy of Gray
  54. Art, Trust, and Betrayal
  55. Nuked US Futures
  56. But There’s Still A Chance, Right?
  57. A Failed Just-So Story
  58. Presidential Decision Markets
  59. Open Thread
  60. Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych
  61. Yes, it can be rational to vote in presidential elections
  62. Debugging Comments
  63. Stop Voting For Nincompoops
  64. I Dare You Bunzl
  65. The American System and Misleading Labels
  66. Some structural biases of the political system
  67. The ordering of authors’ names in academic publications
  68. The Two-Party Swindle
  69. Posting on Politics

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