Eliezer Yudkowsky

How to Actually Change Your Mind

Human intelligence is a superweapon: an amazing capacity that has single-handedly put humans in a dominant position on Earth. When human intelligence defeats itself and goes off the rails, the fallout therefore tends to be a uniquely big deal. In How to Actually Change Your Mind, decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky asks how we can better identify and sort out our biases, integrate new evidence, and achieve lucidity in our daily lives. Because it really seems as though we should be able to do better--and a three-pound all-purpose superweapon is a terrible thing to waste.

Gavin

Imagine someone great - I think of Bertrand Russell or Dan Dennett or CS Peirce or Alan Turing - writing really well about actually scientific self-help. Imagine they wrote most days for 2 years, and so distilled decades of trying to find the truth as a heavily biased primate barely out of the trees. Imagine it was empathic and well-justified with argument and experimental data. But imagine it turns out it wasn't a Canonical figure writing it, but instead some guy on the internet with no credentials and weird opinions. But imagine - or rather, I ask you to trust me, til you see for yourself - that the result matches what the greats achieved in the theory of practical reasoning. (Dennett actually wrote a practical-reason how-to book, and it isn't nearly as good.)


  These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you into interesting new mistakes.


This is only one-sixth of Yudkowsky's enormous 
  Sequences
 - an unusually scientifically accurate philosophical system covering statistics, physics, psychology, history, ethics, and, most importantly, the specific universal obstacles to your being rational. (As a brutal compression, the philosophy can be glossed as radical Bayesian-Quinean evidentialism.) I've read it three times in 10 years, and got more from it each time. Quite a lot of it seemed absurd the first time I read it, for instance his principle of Conservation of Expected Evidence, but I now know it to be mathematically safe. 

There are loads of great tools here. Just one example out of dozens: the idea of a pejorative Fully General Counterargument, a good-sounding objection which applies equally to all possible arguments, and which thus tells you nothing about the truth of the matter. Examples

* “Oh he's an 'expert' is he? Experts are systematically miscalibrated”
* “My opponent is [just] a clever arguer”
* “That evidence was filtered by a biased person, therefore I can ignore it”
* "There are arguments both for and against”

Along with Kant's Transcendental Analytic, The Great Gatsby (don't ask), and Marfarquhar's Strangers Drowning, it's one of the only books I've ever taken paragraph-by-paragraph notes on.

Free, or by donation to his nonprofit, here.

How to Actually Change Your Mind

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