Overcoming Bias

The final sentence is key:

Unless we take our innate biases into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse.

So take your innate biases into account. Familiarise yourself with them. Read books like "Predictably Irrational". Follow Eliezer Yudkowsky most excellent articles on http://www.overcomingbias.com/ (and read his awesome "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality ). Be aware of those biases.

Your subconscious has biases too. Don't take its answers for granted - test them out. Practice figuring out what your subconscious is biased about, and correct for that.

Being a rational thinker is not about explaining/rationalising your conclusions, it's about using subconscious and conscious reasoning in tandem, being aware of the shortcomings of both, and building up to valid conclusions based on whatever evidence you can get your hands on (and acquiring more evidence where useful).

Discuss morality with intelligent people, and study evolutionary psychology, and it will not take you long to realize that every moral system has some edge cases where obeying it will lead to stomach-turning results. Our moral intuitions are lumpy, inconsistent, and contradictory. This is to be expected because we were designed by blind evolution, and not by any sort of logical process.

Ethical systems serve as great guidelines, but it is impossible to find one simple set of consistent ideas to capture everything that an average person feels is right. It is even more impossible (for a non-theist) to find some sort of objective measure of value by which to determine morality.

>"Without this, human actions are no longer guided by reason, and that is a very bad situation."

Human actions are guided by reason, but never solely by reason. We have a lot of innate biases left over from our 3 billion year evolution.

I think you would enjoy this blog:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

I love that the article I presume you got that from [1] states:

> Acceptable answers include statement such as:

> To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community.

Which is not only grammatically incorrect, but grammatically incorrect to the point of message-shattering ambiguity. Is the triplet of statements required for an acceptable answer, or would any individual statement from that list suffice? If all three would be required I doubt I'd have been marked correct - I would have just listed the most important one then moved on to the next question.

[1] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html (first search result for "Se Habla Español Hits Chicago" besides the link you gave)

The problem is that people don't want surprises - they want confirmations of what they already believe.

"The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/

Somehow we what we value is not information. Maybe it is the political use of it - we want to know so that we can pass it to others from our group?

It is perhaps the number one criteria for evaluating an internet source now - does the author(s) welcome surprises? Is there any curiosity in his writing? Hacker News is still quite good on that. Some others: https://marginalrevolution.com/, https://www.gwern.net/index, https://www.overcomingbias.com/

Every single government primary and secondary education system on Earth is a direct descendant of the Prussian one. Non-existent to very limited choice of how one spends ones time, constant ranking and grading to inure people to dominance behaviours that do not come naturally, and all in groups that are age normed rather than competence or ability normed.

School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html

Regarding parasocial relationships in general, I like [0]:

> a few exceptional people (many of them imaginary) get far more love than most people need or can enjoy.

> This seems an essential tragedy of the human condition. You might claim that love isn’t a limited resource, that the more people each of us love, the more love we each have to give out. So there is no conflict between loving popular and imaginary people and loving the rest of us. But while this might be true at some low scales of how many people we love, at the actual scales of love this just doesn’t seem right to me. Love instead seems scarce at the margin.

> Please, someone thoughtful and clever, figure out how we might all be much loved.

[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/alas-unequal-lovehtml