Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won

And

Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year. The former tend to see such questions in more general and abstract terms, and are more insulated from immediate worries about money. The latter tend to see such questions in more concrete and specific terms and ask ‘how does this affect me?’. The former live amid the emotional waves that ripple around powerful and tightly linked self-reinforcing networks. These waves rarely permeate the barrier around insiders and touch others.

Something for LWers to think about. Being smart can make you more susceptible to some biases.

It seems like Brexit was basically a small group of rationalists hijacking history. Remain was overwhelmingly likely without the competence of the leave campaign. Pretty impressive.

Of course I'm sure there's another side to this story, so take it with a pinch of salt.

This was not the content of an article I expected to be written by the mind behind Brexit.

Why? Rationalists are more likely to embrace weird or counter intuitive positions supported by chains of reasoning. I don't mean this as a bad thing. I would think the probability of a rationalist being behind a weird and unconventional position is higher than baseline.

We evolved to avoid disasters where the probability of disaster X happening was unknowable but the outcome was fatal.

Most definitely not.
If the probability of something is unknowable, we die. We might avoid things that we don't know how to calculate exactly, so we buffer with loss aversion. But we most definitely do not have a grasp on ungraspable things.
There's a big difference between 'unknowable' and 'unknowable with precision'.

Well I did get it from Reddit SSC, tbh I was surprised that it wasn't here already.

Anyway, appreciated.

Please keep it. Politics is the mind killer mostly comes into play when debating which side is morally right, not when trying to figure out why one side won.

I feel that there is more than enough rationality-specific content that this link is appropriate. He talks about Superforecasters!

I am extremely uneasy about that being your basis for moderation if you act. The fine article is explicitly about applying rationalist knowledge to effect real world change. If that is not on topic, what are we doing here? Internet philosophy hour?

Genuine question: Did the Apolitical Guideline become an Apolitical Rule? Or have I always been mistaken about it being a guideline?

Politics is not a mindkiller: people are usually mindkilled by politics. But if politics is discussed by people who are not mindkilled, why not keeping it?

I wonder how much of life outcome (after accounting for genetics and your parents' wealth) is determined by your mistakes.

Life is horribly imbalanced; small mistakes can cause insanely disproportional damage. It takes literally a few seconds of time and really bad luck to get killed or injured forever. I know a few people who have serious health problems originating with "when I was a small kid, I was doing [a prefectly innocent activity all kids do all the time], and at some moment I fell down and something broke, and at first everyone thought it would heal okay, but since then at random moments I keep feeling horrible pain in [a body part], and it's been like this for decades, and doctors have no idea how to fix it properly". Or, while it can take only a few minutes to get insights like "eating healthy food and exercising regularly should become one of my top priorities, because it makes life longer and more pleasant", you still have to take everyday actions for months and years to actually achieve this. And then, one unlucky fall may break your spine, and you may end in a wheelchair forever.

One moment of depression is enough to commit suicide, but years of health care cannot cure cancer. Signing one bad contract can cost you a lot of money. It is easy to damage property, but more difficult to fix it. Etc. Even speaking of rationality, good ideas typically additionally require a lot of work, but bad ideas can ruin your life in a few minutes easily.

Sometimes there are opposite situations, for example one could spend years in an abusive relationship, and then end it in an afternoon. Or it may take a while to apply for a great job that requires skills you already happen to have. Making a good friend can significantly improve your life afterwards. -- But it still feels like these are rare exceptions, while the opportunities to ruin your life are there all the time, we just usually avoid them.

It could be interesting to look at one's own life, and try to classify things that had nontrivial impact, by two criteria: "good decision" vs "bad decision", and "one-time decision" vs "repeated decision". But there is a problem that "mistakes we didn't make" are quite invisible. For example, it would be easy to forget things like "not doing crime" or "not taking drugs" in the list of good repeated decisions, but it probably has a big impact. I am not making this list right now, because it would take too much time, but maybe I will do it later privately.

Related: Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction

It seems to me that how to be smart varies widely between professions. (...) Yet such concepts as "be willing to admit you lost", or "policy debates should not appear one-sided", or "plan to overcome your flaws instead of just confessing them", seem like they could apply to many professions. And all this advice is not so much about how to be extraordinarily clever, as, rather, how to not be stupid. Each profession has its own way to be clever, but their ways of not being stupid have much more in common. And while victors may prefer to attribute victory to their own virtue, my small knowledge of history suggests that far more battles have been lost by stupidity than won by genius.

Debiasing is mostly not about how to be extraordinarily clever, but about how to not be stupid. Its great successes are disasters that do not materialize, defeats that never happen, mistakes that no one sees because they are not made. Often you can't even be sure that something would have gone wrong if you had not tried to debias yourself. You don't always see the bullet that doesn't hit you.

The great victories of debiasing are exactly the lottery tickets we didn't buy - the hopes and dreams we kept in the real world, instead of diverting them into infinitesimal probabilities. The triumphs of debiasing are cults not joined; optimistic assumptions rejected during planning; time not wasted on blind alleys. It is the art of non-self-destruction. Admittedly, none of this is spectacular enough to make the evening news.