Overcoming Bias
Article
Overcoming Bias is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 29, 2021 and April 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong”; “Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, a blog my bride and I both read”; “Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work”. It most often appears alongside Robin Hanson, 2008 America, @agoodmanbacon.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 29, 2021
- Last seen: April 24, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Robin Hanson (2 shared issues)
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- 2008 America (1 shared issues)
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- @agoodmanbacon (1 shared issues)
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- Aella (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- Andrew Jackson (1 shared issues)
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- Baicker (1 shared issues)
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- Barack Obama (1 shared issues)
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- Bayes’ Rule (1 shared issues)
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- being-a-good-person training (1 shared issues)
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- beta-blockers (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the “rationalist community” centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka “CFAR”, yes, it’s a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.
Inline links: Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong
Like - a big part of why so many people - the kind of people who would have read Predictably Irrational in 2008 or commented on Overcoming Bias in 2010 - moved on was because just learning that biases existed didn’t really seem to help much. CFAR wanted to find a way to teach people about biases that actually stuck and improved decision-making. To that end, they ran dozens of workshops over about a decade, testing various techniques and seeing which ones seemed to stick and make a difference. Galef is their co-founder and former president, and Scout Mindset is an attempt to write down what she learned.
This is the title image of Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, a blog my bride and I both read. The Greek hero Odysseus is sailing through Siren-infested waters. He knows that the Sirens have hypnotic powers, and that anyone who hears their song will stop thinking straight and probably steer their boat into a rock or something. So before the Sirens appear, he ties himself to the mast, so that the future version of himself who hears the Siren song can’t screw anything up. Hanson uses it as a general symbol of thoughtful precommitment, of taking steps to constrain future selves who might have values unaligned with yours. Marriage - and any other contract - is a deliberate effort to constrain your future actions so that you can make long-term plans that heavily affect other people - your spouse, but also your future children - without them having to constantly worry about you running off to any Siren you hear.
Inline links: Overcoming Bias
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]