Article on confirmation bias for the Smith Alumnae Quarterly

Your use of the Summers incident seems far more likely to inflame people than help educate. I predict it will increase the number of readers whose takeaway from the article is that you simply want to defend the indefensible, and are best to be ignored. People who already agree with you will enjoy it.

This is not an article about confirmation bias. It is an article about your political beliefs, rationalized by accusing your opponents of confirmation bias. It does both subjects a disservice.

From my perspective you're glossing over the distinction between rationality and values and that opens multiple ways for dismissing your arguments. For example,

You know that confirmation bias corrupts your thinking if you dismiss the opinions of experts on topics you don’t really understand.

Not necessarily -- if I know that the opinion of experts is driven by certain values and I reject these values, I can reasonably dismiss the experts' opinions even if I don't understand the technicalities. In crude terms, I don't care how they propose to get to X if I don't want to go to X.

Same thing:

...you have never done the graduate level work in mathematics and statistics necessary to properly evaluate what the IMF does.

A lot of people in your audience reject "what the IMF does" on the basis of values. Grad level math is entirely unnecessary for that.

You kinda recognize that in the beginning by admitting that you don't want to invite Moloch worshipers even if you don't have a graduate degree in religious studies.

One more nitpick/question -- what in the world is an "objectively reasonable political belief" and how do you distinguish it from an "objectively unreasonable" one? Do you just mean a correct view of reality?

Recall that the original meaning of "politics is the mind killer" was not an Eliezer's injunction against mixing politics and rationality, but a warning against unnecessarily using political examples to make a non-political argument:

What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question?

Your examples of IQ, MSNBC, IMF and feminism are unnecessarily polarizing if your goal is to discuss confirmation bias.

If you still decided that the head of the IMF is unfit to speak with the people you are paid a lot of money to educate, then confirmation bias comfortably feeds on your brain.

I'm not sure how strongly that holds, but it's worth mentally noting that "The most qualified people to make policy decision D are all F's, so anybody who is not an F should defer to any F on D" is a logical fallacy, albeit possibly strong evidence, depending on context.

For example, maybe all the most qualified experts on the existence of God(s) are philosophers. But given LW's broad atheism, I reckon the people who upvoted your post would have a hard time accepting that a weekend atheist should defer to a theistic philosopher. Someone could start out with the basic beliefs of the head of the IMF and be polarized further in those beliefs by their studies of economics, only remembering the economic evidence favouring their position. If one thinks this happens about equally to those one agrees with and those one disagrees with, then one's posterior ends up being the same as the prior; one expects to see lots of disagreeing experts regardless of whether one is correct.

Too many fnords in this.

I really enjoyed that.

Instead of simply saying "fight confirmation bias", try to give reasons why to fight confirmation bias. Being less wrong is often not rewarding enough for people.

Fighting confirmation bias makes you sexy! It will make your peers all think you're smart! You'll feel better about yourself!

You say "many of us among the academically gifted derive a huge amount of self-worth from thinking that WE ARE RIGHT." How could you redirect some of that perceived potential self-worth gain into fighting confirmation bias?