Rationality: A-Z

The sword of truth is very heavy. The first rule of wizards. People are vulnerable. Everyone is vulnerable. It does not make you weak. It's is a strength. The greatest power. To open. To allow the death, pain and suffering of others to flow into you. To make you greater. And... to look at life in a different way. With even more compassion. Never less. ____ # Rationality: A-Z ## Preface # Map and Territory *The First Book* ## Biases: An Introduction: **Statistical Bias**: Skews samples so that they less closely resemble larger populations. If your sampling is not biased, then your estimates about the large population won't be incorrect *on average*. The more you learn, the smaller your error will tend to be. With Statistical Bias in your sampling, the more you learn the further you may skew your estimates away from reality. Such samples maybe be unrepresentative *in a consistent direction*. _ **Cognitive Bias**: A systematic way that your innate patterns of thought fall short of truth (or some other attainable goal, such as happiness). Minds can come to undermine themselves, despite "learning" more. **System 1 processes**: fast, implicit, associative, automatic cognition. **System 2 processes**: slow, explicit, intellectual, controlled cognition. **Cognitive Heuristics**: Rough shortcuts our brains have evolved to employ that get the right answer often, but not all the time. Cognitive biases arise when the corners cut by these heuristics result in a relatively consistent and discrete mistake. **Representativeness Heuristic**: our tendency to assess phenomena by how representative they seem of various categories. Can lead to biases such as *conjunction fallacy* and *base rate neglect*. **Conjunction Fallacy**: failing to grasp for all A,B: P(A and B) <= P(A). The moral? Adding more detail or extra assumptions can make an event seem more plausible, even though the event necessarily becomes less probable. Experimental subjects considered it less likely that a strong tennis player would “lose the first set” than that he would “lose the first set but win the match.” Making a comeback seems more typical of a strong player, so we overestimate the probability of this complicated-but-sensible-sounding narrative compared to the probability of a strictly simpler scenario. __