You’re actually citing evidence that supports my position. Yudkowsky makes it explicit in his essay that he didn’t “get it” before, but that he does now. That goes against The Last Psychiatrist’s claim that everyone (everyone!) makes decisions as thought they believe in God
The hyperbole of “everyone” you’re focusing on doesn’t really seem a significant argument against him, when a bias so widespread is being discussed. The purpose is to get his ideas across with a sharp style, not to be 100% accurate, and if he were to say that this happens not to you necessarily, but rather to 99.9% of people, then 99% of his readers would probably think they personally fell inside the 0.1% that was immune to such thinking...
I’m likewise now pulling those numbers out of my ass, btw, for the purposes of illustrating my point, not the purpose of being 100% accurate.
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.
You’re actually citing evidence that supports my position. Yudkowsky makes it explicit in his essay that he didn’t “get it” before, but that he does now. That goes against The Last Psychiatrist’s claim that everyone (everyone!) makes decisions as thought they believe in God
The hyperbole of “everyone” you’re focusing on doesn’t really seem a significant argument against him, when a bias so widespread is being discussed. The purpose is to get his ideas across with a sharp style, not to be 100% accurate, and if he were to say that this happens not to you necessarily, but rather to 99.9% of people, then 99% of his readers would probably think they personally fell inside the 0.1% that was immune to such thinking...
I’m likewise now pulling those numbers out of my ass, btw, for the purposes of illustrating my point, not the purpose of being 100% accurate.
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.