I’d heard about it before, but finally went to read it after Eric Raymond blogged about it. It being:
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
In which Eliezer Yudkowsky “re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works”.
It’s quite a learning experience, especially if you look up the bits you don’t understand. For example, I now know what arbitrage is.
Here’s a snippet from chapter one:
“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”
The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. “Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? When you say that rationality is your favorite thing ever and read so much about it? I thought you’d know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you’re only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”
[...]
“Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation – that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um… I can’t think offhand of where to find something about how it’s an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of violence or violent arguments -”
The author uses the pen name Less Wrong, which comes from a “community wiki devoted to refining the art of human rationality” called Less Wrong.
It’s the sort of site within which I imagine I could spend hours following the cross references. I haven’t yet, but one article about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence ends on this paragraph:
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge. The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation. If you don’t notice when your model makes the evidence unlikely, you might as well have no model, and also you might as well have no evidence; no brain and no eyes.
Which immediately made me think of global warmists who seem to always strive to fit the evidence to their hypotheses.
That site also contains lots of arguments about how to change your mind. One of these is titled Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this will be a good site to go to to challenge my beliefs.
