Lack of new information if I observe an event that had a probability of 1 of occurring, I have no new knowledge That is: If P(B)=1, then P(A|B)=P(A) More generally: if I observe an event that had the same probability of occurring for all hypotheses under consideration, then I have no new knowledge about those [...]
Archive for April, 2010
Sleeping Beauty
Posted in behavior, rationality, philosophy, statistics, tagged anthropic, probability, rationality on April 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Not locking in
Posted in behavior, rationality, cognitive biases, tagged behavior, cognitive biases, dunning-kruger effect, rationality on April 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The Dunning-Kruger effect was recognized by Bertrand Russell in the 1930s: “..the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Dunning and Kruger showed that the poorest performers grossly overestimate how well they perform relative to their peers. They also found that the top performers underestimate their superiority. While many people have noticed [...]
Self-serving credit and blame
Posted in behavior, rationality, books, cognitive biases, religion, tagged cognitive biases, errol morris, theodore dreiser on April 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
In An American Tragedy, Dreiser writes: For in some blind, dualistic way both she and Asa insisted, as do all religionists, in disassociating God from harm and error and misery, while granting Him nevertheless supreme control. They would seek for something else — some malign, treacherous, deceiving power which, in the face of God’s omniscience [...]
Self-indication assumption
Posted in philosophy, science, statistics, tagged anthropic, philosophy, probability, self-indication assumption on April 11, 2010 | 6 Comments »
In thinking about the self-indication assumption, let’s consider some experiments. Experiment 1a Suppose there are 1 million balls in an urn. 1 ball is orange and the rest are blue. The algorithm goes like this: flip a coin. If heads, Large World wins and 999,999 balls will be randomly selected from the urn. If tails, [...]
Harm more noticeable?
Posted in behavior, rationality, cognitive biases on April 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
When I was running today, I started with the wind to my back. However, I didn’t even notice it was windy until I turned around and started running into the wind. I wonder if this is a general principle: that we are more likely to notice something that is harming us than we are something [...]
Wrong questions and hidden conditioning
Posted in philosophy, science, statistics, tagged doomsday argument, philosophy, probability, self-indication assumption on April 10, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Rare events Suppose you drew 5 cards and they were all hearts. You might ask “what’s the probability of drawing 5 hearts at random from a 52 card deck?” Well, sure, that’s easy enough to calculate. The probability is 0.000495. Wow! Such a rare event! Must be your lucky day. But… the reason you asked [...]
Immediate rewards bias
Posted in behavior, rationality, cognitive biases, science, tagged cognitive biases on April 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »
While humans tend to have more self-control than other species, they still place irrationally high value on rewards in the present. For example, many people would prefer $50 today over $55 next week. However, they would tend to prefer $55 53 weeks from now over $50 52 weeks from now. We discount the penalty for [...]
