How to Actually Change Your Mind is the second book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is the edited version of a series of blog posts in “the Sequences”, and covers the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality: triumphing over confirmation bias and motivated cognition.
How to Actually Change Your Mind contains seven sequences of essays. These are all collected in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies ebook, but the essay names below are also linked to the original blog posts.
The previous book in the series is Map and Territory, and the next book is The Machine in the Ghost.
E. Overly Convenient Excuses
46. The Proper Use of Humility
48. Lotteries: A Waste of Hope
50. But There’s Still A Chance, Right?
53. How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
55. 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
56. Your Rationality is My Business
F. Politics and Rationality
57. Politics is the Mind-Killer
58. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
59. The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality
61. Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
62. Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
63. Argument Screens Off Authority
64. Hug the Query
65. Rationality and the English Language
66. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
G. Against Rationalization
67. Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
68. Update Yourself Incrementally
69. One Argument Against An Army
70. The Bottom Line
71. What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
72. Rationalization
74. Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points
75. Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation
77. Is That Your True Rejection?
78. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
79. Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
H. Against Doublethink
81. Singlethink
82. Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased
83. No, Really, I’ve Deceived Myself
85. Moore’s Paradox
86. Don’t Believe You’ll Self-Deceive
I. Seeing with Fresh Eyes
89. Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?
90. Cached Thoughts
92. Original Seeing
94. The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
97. We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
98. Hold Off On Proposing Solutions‴
J. Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor
100. The Affect Heuristic
101. Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping
102. Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism
103. The Halo Effect
104. Superhero Bias
105. Mere Messiahs
107. Resist the Happy Death Spiral
108. Uncritical Supercriticality
109. Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
110. When None Dare Urge Restraint
111. The Robbers Cave Experiment
112. Every Cause Wants to be a Cult
114. Guardians of the Gene Pool
116. Two Cult Koans
117. Asch’s Conformity Experiment
118. On Expressing Your Concerns
119. Lonely Dissent
120. Cultish Countercultishness
K. Letting Go
121. The Importance of Saying “Oops”
122. The Crackpot Offer
125. You Can Face Reality
126. The Meditation on Curiosity
127. No One Can Exempt You From Rationality’s Laws
129. Crisis of Faith
130. The Ritual