Overcoming Bias Anthology

post by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2024-10-20T02:01:23.463Z · LW · GW · 14 comments

This is a link post for https://overcoming-bias-anthology.com/

Contents

  Part 1: Our Thinking
    Near and Far
    Disagreement
    Biases
  Part 2: Our Motives
    Signaling
    Norms
    Fiction
    The Dreamtime
  Part 3: Our Institutions
    Prediction Markets
    Academia
    Medicine
    Paternalism
    Law
  Part 4: Our Past
    Farmers and Foragers
    History as Exponential Modes
    The Great Filter
  Part 5: Our Future
    Aliens
    UFOs
    The Age of Em
    Artificial Intelligence
None
14 comments

Part 1: Our Thinking

Near and Far

1 Abstract/Distant Future Bias

2 Abstractly Ideal, Concretely Selfish

3 We Add Near, Average Far

4 Why We Don't Know What We Want

5 We See the Sacred from Afar, to See It Together

6 The Future Seems Shiny

7 Doubting My Far Mind

Disagreement

8 Beware the Inside View

9 Are Meta Views Outside Views?

10 Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias

11 Others' Views Are Detail

12 Why Be Contrarian?

13 On Disagreement, Again

14 Rationality Requires Common Priors

15 Might Disagreement Fade Like Violence?

Biases

16 Reject Random Beliefs

17 Chase Your Reading

18 Against Free Thinkers

19 Eventual Futures

20 Seen vs. Unseen Biases

21 Law as No-Bias Theatre

22 Benefit of Doubt = Bias

Part 2: Our Motives

Signaling

23 Decision Theory Remains Neglected

24 What Function Music?

25 Politics isn't about Policy

26 Views Aren't About Sights

27 Why Do Bets Look Bad?

28 Homo Hypocritus

29 Resolving Your Hypocrisy

30 Errors, Lies, and Self-Deception

Norms

31 Enforce Common Norms On Elites

32 Identity Norms

33 Exclusion As A Substitute For Norms, Law, & Governance

34 How Idealists Aid Cheaters

35 Beware Mob War Strategy

36 Automatic Norms

37 10 Implications of Automatic Norms

38 Automatic Norm Lessons

39 Automatic Norms in Academia

Fiction

40 Plot Holes & Blame Holes

41 Fairy Tales Were Cynical

42 Why Fiction Lies

43 Biases Of Fiction

44 Why We Fight Over Fiction

45 Stories Are Like Religion

46 More Stories As Religion

The Dreamtime

47 This is the Dream Time

48 DreamTime

49 Dreamtime Social Games

50 We Moderns Are Status-Drunk

51 Earth: A Status Report

52 On Teen Angst

Part 3: Our Institutions

Prediction Markets

53 Prediction Markets "Fail" To Mooch

54 Seeking Robust Credible Expertise Buyers

55 Prediction Markets Need Trial and Error

56 New-Hire Prediction Markets

57 Shoulda-Listened Futures

58 Brand Truth Narrowly

Academia

59 Fixing Academia Via Prediction Markets

60 Intellectual Prestige Futures

61 Academic Stats Prediction Markets

62 How To Fund Prestige Science

Medicine

63 Medical Doubts OpEd

64 Medical Market Failures

Paternalism

65 Paternalism Is About Status

66 Rulesy Folks Push Paternalism

67 Universal Basic Dorms

Law

68 Elites Must Rule

69 Status App Concept

70 Our Prestige Obsession

71 Yay Stability Rents

72 Conditional Harberger Tax Games

73 Reliable Private-Enough Physical Identity

74 Freedom Isn't Free

75 Quality Regs Say 'High Is Good'

76 Socialism: A Gift You'd Exchange?

77 Vouch For Pandemic Passports

78 Can We Tame Political Minds?

79 Consider Reparations

80 Regulating Infinity

81 Privately Enforced & Punished Crime

82 Fine Grain Futarchy Zoning Via Harberger Taxes

Part 4: Our Past

Farmers and Foragers

83 Fear Made Farmers

84 Forage vs Farm Future

85 Two Types of People

86 Forager v Farmer, Elaborated

87 Rome As Semi-Foragers

88 Self-Control Is Slavery

89 School Is To Submit

90 Why Grievances Grow

91 The World Forager Elite

History as Exponential Modes

92 The Great Cycle Rule

93 The Labor-From-Factories Explosion

94 Lost Advanced Civilizations

The Great Filter

95 Try-Try or Try-Once Great Filter?

96 Great Filter with Set-Backs, Dead-Ends

97 Seeing ANYTHING Other Than Huge-Civ Is Bad News

98 Our Level in the Great Filter

99 At Least Two Filters

100 Fertility: The Big Problem

Part 5: Our Future

Aliens

101 Humans Are Early

102 An Alien War Nightmare

103 Non-Grabby Legacies

104 Why We Can't See Grabby Aliens

105 Beware General Visible Near Prey

106 If The Future Is Big

UFOs

107 UFOs – What The Hell?

108 On UFOs-As-Aliens Priors

109 My Awkward Inference

110 UFO Stylized Social Facts

111 Explaining Stylized UFO Facts

The Age of Em

112 Why Age of Em Will Happen

113 How To Not Die (Soon)

114 How Does Brain Code Differ?

115 Progeny Probabilities: Souls, Ems, Quantum

116 Em Redistribution

Artificial Intelligence

117 A.I. Old-Timers

118 How Lumpy AI Services?

119 A History Of Foom

120 I Still Don't Get Foom

121 Foom Justifies AI Risk Efforts Now

122 Is The City-ularity Near?

123 The Betterness Explosion

124 An Outside View of AI Control

125 AI Risk, Again


 

14 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by George Ingebretsen (george-ingebretsen) · 2024-10-24T03:04:45.918Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How difficult would it be to turn this into an epub or pdf? Is there word of that coming soon? (or integrating into LW like the Codex?)

comment by Nutrition Capsule · 2024-10-20T13:01:45.471Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very good! Hoping to see - weakly intending to commit - a post list of his latest boom (fertility decline, which lead him to culture). I attended one of Robin's Zoom meetings on culture, and I'm confident it is on par with his other great fixations thus far (prediction markets, signaling, ems and aliens) if not even bigger. Robin seems absolutely possessed by the phenomenon.

For those who do not follow him: Robin has begun seeing culture as broken/maladaptive, and he seems to think this is perhaps the key issue of our time, on par or bigger than climate change and AI. He thinks that cultural change is driven into directions which will eventually lead to population decline and nasty places, even though he remains optimistic on our species' future in the long run.

Replies from: jmh, nc
comment by jmh · 2024-10-29T00:31:45.817Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Could you clarify a bit here. Is Hanson talking about specific cultures or all of the instances of culture?

Replies from: Nutrition Capsule
comment by Nutrition Capsule · 2024-11-02T10:14:02.827Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hanson seems to treat the global civilization as a cultural melting pot, but he does distinguish insular subcultures from that. I intuit he sees contemporary cultures on a gradient relative to global, hegemonic trends (which correlate with technological progress, increasing wealth and education) and thereby drifting pressures.

comment by nc · 2024-10-20T16:52:03.282Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Are you aware of anyone else working on the same topic?

Replies from: alexander-gietelink-oldenziel
comment by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel (alexander-gietelink-oldenziel) · 2024-10-20T17:32:19.320Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is not novel to Hanson, it's been a staple of (neo)reactionary /conservative thought for millenia.

Replies from: Nutrition Capsule
comment by Nutrition Capsule · 2024-10-23T04:16:38.078Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I wouldn't equate Robin's perspectives on culture with reactionary movements or conservatism. If anything, he seems quite open to radical transformations of society (e.g. futarchy to replace parlamentarism, bounty systems and vouching to replace policing, private insurance policies to replace welfare policies etc.).

Whereas (neo-)reactionary / conservative thought simply often intends to return some previous status quo, Robin does not confess to representing such views and has not proposed such solutions. In fact, as far as I'm aware he hasn't proposed any solutions at all as of yet.

EDIT: (Mis-)interpreted your comment as Robin pushing (neo-)reactionary ideas. I do agree that conservative and reactionary movements generally show interest towards cultural drift as a phenomenon. However, if you propose that Robin's ideas themselves are not novel, I'd like to hear which ideas in particular you think have already been tackled for millenia or some other timescale.

comment by Fabien Roger (Fabien) · 2024-10-28T17:09:11.771Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have converted the anthology into an audio format using the default (and terrible) AWS AI voice (mostly for my own consumption): https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fabien368/episodes/Overcoming-bias-anthology---our-thinking-e2q61mg

comment by kave · 2024-12-04T23:03:31.860Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Robin Hanson is one of the intellectual fathers of LessWrong, and I'm very glad there's a curated, organised list of some of his main themes.

He's the first thinker I remember reading and thinking "what? that's completely wrong", who went on to have a big influence on my thought. Apparently I'm not an isolated case (paragraph 3 page 94).

Thanks, Arjun and Richard [LW · GW].

comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2024-10-23T16:58:28.385Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I notice that there's just shy of 128 here and they're mostly pretty short, so you can start the day by flipping a coin 7 times to decide which one to read. Not a bisection search, just convert the seven flips to binary and pick the corresponding number. At first, you only have to start over and do another 7 flips if you land on 1111110 (126), 1111111 (127), or 0000000 (128).

If you drink coffee in the morning, this is a way better way to start the day than social media, as the early phase of the stimulant effect reinforces behavior in most people. Hanson's approach to various topics is a good mentality to try boosting this way.

comment by Yoav Ravid · 2024-10-21T03:58:08.103Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Typo: It's Prediction Markets "Fail" To *Mooch (not Moloch)

Replies from: arjun-panickssery
comment by xpym · 2024-10-20T12:59:28.816Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is this related to the bounty [LW · GW], or a separate project?

Replies from: arjun-panickssery
comment by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2024-10-20T20:00:09.138Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah it's for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.