Not literally God, just faith in the idea that bad things above a certain threshold somehow aren’t allowed to happen to you. Sometimes the power is thought to be in some other, real or unreal entity, like the state or the fed or democracy or science or whatever. And sometimes it’s not. It’s just a bias, floating around in your thoughts in ways you aren’t terribly aware of.
He wasn’t generalizing from one example. He cites many example of people talking and thinking like this.
I’m going to go ahead and take his side on this one. It’s just a bias. It’s a cognitive malfunction of your brain that you might be able to work your way around by reframing if you remain vigilantly aware of it, or you construct a formula (like an actuary would) and operate according to that formula with as little input from the relevant buggy software in your brain as possible, but the bias is still there. For the vast, vast, vast, majority of people that bias is here to stay.
Like scope sensitivity, I really don’t think there’s much fixing it (without upgrading the hardware) and I just basically don’t believe people who think they have accomplished this via mental discipline. It’s possible, but it seems extremely unlikely. What’s more, a claim like that seems motivated by exactly the same kind of optimistic bias.
Not literally God, just faith in the idea that bad things above a certain threshold somehow aren’t allowed to happen to you. Sometimes the power is thought to be in some other, real or unreal entity, like the state or the fed or democracy or science or whatever. And sometimes it’s not. It’s just a bias, floating around in your thoughts in ways you aren’t terribly aware of.
He wasn’t generalizing from one example. He cites many example of people talking and thinking like this.
I’m going to go ahead and take his side on this one. It’s just a bias. It’s a cognitive malfunction of your brain that you might be able to work your way around by reframing if you remain vigilantly aware of it, or you construct a formula (like an actuary would) and operate according to that formula with as little input from the relevant buggy software in your brain as possible, but the bias is still there. For the vast, vast, vast, majority of people that bias is here to stay.
Like scope sensitivity, I really don’t think there’s much fixing it (without upgrading the hardware) and I just basically don’t believe people who think they have accomplished this via mental discipline. It’s possible, but it seems extremely unlikely. What’s more, a claim like that seems motivated by exactly the same kind of optimistic bias.