Can you have causation without correlation? (Surprisingly, yes)

March 14, 2022

Here are five ways you can have correlation without causation: 1. Averaging: increasing A sometimes causes increasing B, but other times, it causes B to decrease. The two balance out. Since correlation measures the average relationship, the correlation is zero. For example, if you drive up a symmetrical hill and then down the other side, there’s no correlation between how many times the wheels have revolved on the hill and the car’s height above sea level, even though the revolving of the...

The many forms of belief

October 11, 2020

What does it mean to believe? We often say things like "I believe..." and "they think that..." But what do we really mean by a "belief"? It's notoriously tricky to define. For starters, we sometimes think of beliefs in binaries (true vs. false) and other times in probabilities (a 90% chance of coming true). We sometimes would be willing to bet on our beliefs ("I'll bet you $100 that New York City is not the capital of New York State"), and other times we wouldn't be willing to bet (e.g...

The FIRE Framework: deciding when to trust your gut

April 7, 2019

Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019. The idea that you should "just trust your gut" - that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) - is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we're best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short). Case 1: Fast decisionsThere is no cho...

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...

Careful Analysis vs. Automatic Processing

August 12, 2011

Thinking very carefully about problems can be an extremely powerful way to answer questions or make predictions. But there are some problems for which our non-conscious processing systems produce superior results. Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as "dangerous" or "not dangerous", "food" or "not food", "person" or "not person", ...

Should We Trust Our Gut? – The Idealization of Intuition and Instinct

December 30, 2009

This is an old essay written in December 2009. I'm posting it on this site (with minor edits) today, January 13, 2023. It is common to hear advice that amounts to "going with your gut," "trusting your instincts," or "following your intuition." But these suggestions seem to indicate that the answers we arrive at through careful thought are sometimes (or perhaps usually) inferior to our immediate reactions. Consider the following representative quotes: Keep the faith, don't lose yo...