Three reasons to be cautious when reading data-driven “explanations”

September 10, 2023

Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash

Did you know that fairly often, there will be multiple extremely different stories you can tell about identical data, none of which are false? In other words, the mapping from statistical results to true stories about those results is not unique. This leads to a lot of confusion, and it also implies that claims about "the reason" behind a complex social phenomenon should be interpreted with caution. Here are 3 common situations of this happening, each illustrated with realistic political ...

Soldier Altruists vs. Scout Altruists

April 23, 2021

There is an important division between people who want to improve the world that few seem to be aware of. Inspired by Julia Galef's new book (The Scout Mindset), I'll call this division: Soldier Altruists vs. Scout Altruists. 1. Soldier Altruists think it's obvious how to improve the world and that we just need to execute those obvious steps. They see the barriers to a better world as: (i) not enough people taking action (e.g., due to ignorance, selfishness, or propaganda), and ...

The many ways to make inferences

October 7, 2018

There are a LOT of ways to make inferences. Many more, I think, than is generally realized. And they all have their weaknesses. You can make inferences using… (1) Deduction: As a consequence of the definition of X and Y, if X then Y. X applies to this case. Therefore Y. “Plato is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore Plato is mortal.” “For any number that is an integer, there exists another integer greater than that number. 1,000,000 is an integer. So there exists an in...

Productive Disagreements – An Interactive Event Format

June 25, 2017

I ran a "Productive Disagreements" event last night, a new interactive format I've been working on where attendees practice structured disagreements on controversial topics in order to learn from each other and get experience accurately modeling other people's perspectives. Here are the materials, in case you want to run an event like this or just learn about the format: Part 1: Brief presentation about why disagreements are so often unproductive 1. You want to "win" more than you want...

Why do people not behave in their own self-interest?

March 19, 2017

Naively, one might assume that people do what it benefits them to do. In fact, that's an assumption commonly made in economics. Yet it's clear that our behavior is not always in our own self-interest. People frequently buy fake supplements, try drugs they know are highly addictive, eat things they know they'll later regret, drive away the people they love most, procrastinate on really important things, and so on. So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here's my list of reasons we ...

What Seemed Like Perfect Reasoning Utterly Failed

February 1, 2014

Does warm water sometimes freeze faster than cold water when placed in the same conditions? "Absolutely no way," I said, a mere minute after I heard the claim. "People sometimes claim that NASA faked the moon landing too," I thought to myself. I pointed out why this claim is impossible. As warm water cools it must eventually reach the same temperature that the cool water started at. From that point on, the warm water will behave just like the cool water, but it will have taken the warm water a ...

Deconstructing Accomplishment

September 17, 2011

Accomplishments are usually only achieved when a number of factors all come together. Take, for example, a tennis player. It is unlikely that he will accomplish a lot if he doesn't have ambitious goals. If he only plays for fun, or to be the best player in his tennis club, it is very unlikely he'll put in sufficient effort to win a major tournament. So ambition will be an important ingredient in determining his level of success. What's more, to attain great things in tennis, the player need to s...

The Interplay Between Your Reason and Emotions

July 31, 2011

It can sometimes be useful to think of yourself as consisting of multiple systems. You have an emotional system that constantly processes your sensory input and thoughts, and produces emotions like fear, anger, happiness and contempt based on this input. You also have a reasoning system, which is what you use when you are reasoning, planning, analyzing and consciously predicting. But the operations of these two systems are not independent. In fact, they each have the power to alter the operation...