Anyone know how to defeat the availability heuristic? Put another way, does anyone have advice on how to deal with incoherent or insane propositions while losing as little personal sanity as possible? Is there such a thing as “safety gloves” for dangerous memes?
I’m asking because I’m currently studying for the California Bar exam, which requires me to memorize hundreds of pages of legal rules, together with their so-called justifications. Of course, in many cases the “justifications” are incoherent, Orwellian doublespeak, and/or tendentiously ideological. I really do want to memorize (nearly) all of these justifications, so that I can be sure to pass the exam and continue my career as a rationalist lawyer, but I don’t want the pattern of thought used by the justifications to become a part of my pattern of thought.
I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the “overly sincere” types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.
You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints—Nick Szabo’s online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.
ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person’s rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure—to get a real high—from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality—well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.
One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)
I worry about this as well when I’m reading long arguments or long works of fiction presenting ideas I disagree with. My tactic is to stop occasionally and go through a mental dialog simulating how I would respond to the author in person. This serves a double purpose, as hopefully I’ll have better cached arguments in the event I ever need them.
Of course, this is a dangerous tactic as well, because you may be shutting off critical reasoning applied to your preexisting beliefs. I only apply this tactic when I’m very confident the author is wrong and is using fallacious arguments. Even then I make sure to spend some amount of time playing devil’s advocate.
Anyone know how to defeat the availability heuristic? Put another way, does anyone have advice on how to deal with incoherent or insane propositions while losing as little personal sanity as possible? Is there such a thing as “safety gloves” for dangerous memes?
I’m asking because I’m currently studying for the California Bar exam, which requires me to memorize hundreds of pages of legal rules, together with their so-called justifications. Of course, in many cases the “justifications” are incoherent, Orwellian doublespeak, and/or tendentiously ideological. I really do want to memorize (nearly) all of these justifications, so that I can be sure to pass the exam and continue my career as a rationalist lawyer, but I don’t want the pattern of thought used by the justifications to become a part of my pattern of thought.
I would not worry overmuch about the long-term negative effects of your studying for the bar: with the possible exception of the “overly sincere” types who fall very hard for cults and other forms of indoctrination, people have a lot of antibodies to this kind of thing.
You will continue to be entagled with reality after you pass the exam, and you can do things, like read works of social science that carve reality at the joints, to speed up the rate at which your continued entaglement with reality with cancel out any falsehoods you have to cram for now. Specifically, there are works about the law that do carve reality at the joints—Nick Szabo’s online writings IMO fall in that category. Nick has a law degree, by the way, and there is certainly nothing wrong with his ability to perceive reality correctly.
ADDED. The things that are really damaging to a person’s rationality, IMHO, are natural human motivations. When for example you start practicing, if you were to decide to do a lot of trials, and you learned to derive pleasure—to get a real high—from the combative and adversarial part of that, so that the high you got from winning with a slick and misleading angle trumped the high you get from satisfying you curiosity and from refining and finding errors in your model of reality—well, I would worry about that a lot more than your throwing yourself fully into winning on this exam because IMHO the things we derive no pleasure from, but do to achieve some end we care about (like advancing in our career by getting a credential) have a lot less influence on who we turn out to be than things we do because we find them intrinsically rewarding.
One more thing: we should not all make our living as computer programmers. That would make the community less robust than it otherwise would be :)
Thank you! This is really helpful, and I look forward to reading Szabo in August.
I worry about this as well when I’m reading long arguments or long works of fiction presenting ideas I disagree with. My tactic is to stop occasionally and go through a mental dialog simulating how I would respond to the author in person. This serves a double purpose, as hopefully I’ll have better cached arguments in the event I ever need them.
Of course, this is a dangerous tactic as well, because you may be shutting off critical reasoning applied to your preexisting beliefs. I only apply this tactic when I’m very confident the author is wrong and is using fallacious arguments. Even then I make sure to spend some amount of time playing devil’s advocate.