Saturday, October 2, 2021

Confirmation Bias is More Unreal than Real

"Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias"
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset

Reality: there is no confirmation bias, but there is "lying through your teeth" bias. Sophists gonna Soph.

"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."

This is known as trying to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep. 

Galef and Yvain are also Sophists, truly committed to Fascism. Trying to stop them is also trying to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep. Did they really spend over a decade on this and it never occurred to them that humans might like to lie? Some sort of anti-induction of Solomonoff? Of course not. Clearly they're not starving in the streets, they're still having TED Sophist talks and workshops and selling books. The gig is working for them, and they'll keep pretending to believe in it. A fortiori: it's a real job; Elluls's demand for propaganda is real and it's not low.


If you genuinely want to know the truth, it's really not that hard. Hence Conquest #1; it's normal for untrained folk to manage it. The issue is motivation. 

No amount of clever workshopping can cause Satan's children to prefer the truth.

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