Truth is really important sometimes, but so far I’ve been bad about identifying when.
I know a fair bit about cognitive biases and ideal probabilistic reasoning, and I’m pretty good at applying it to scientific papers that I read or that people link through Facebook. But these applications are usually not important.
But, when it comes to my schoolwork and personal relationships, I commit the planning fallacy routinely, and make bad predictions against base rates. And I spend no time analyzing these kinds of mistakes or applying what I know about biases and probability theory.
If I really operationalized my belief that only some truths are important, I’d prioritize truths and apply my rationality knowledge to the top priorities. That would be awesome.
Truth is really important sometimes, but so far I’ve been bad about identifying when.
I know a fair bit about cognitive biases and ideal probabilistic reasoning, and I’m pretty good at applying it to scientific papers that I read or that people link through Facebook. But these applications are usually not important.
But, when it comes to my schoolwork and personal relationships, I commit the planning fallacy routinely, and make bad predictions against base rates. And I spend no time analyzing these kinds of mistakes or applying what I know about biases and probability theory.
If I really operationalized my belief that only some truths are important, I’d prioritize truths and apply my rationality knowledge to the top priorities. That would be awesome.