We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than p...
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epistemology
The Mental Models You Don’t Know About
I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-...
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Does Meditation Really Demonstrate There Is No You?
An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the "illusion of the self" and then claim something like “there is no self”.
To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it's a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all t...
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Don’t Over-Rely On One Type of Evidence
Understanding the world well involves synthesizing evidence from disparate sources:
1. Direct experience: if you only believe what you directly witness, you’ll greatly underestimate the diversity of cultures, and literally think the earth is flat.
2. Knowledgeable authority: if you believe whatever your community’s trusted authorities say, then if you were born in a cult you’ll still be in it, and if your authorities become corrupt, they’ll exploit you.
3. Valid reason: if you believe ...
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When Fallacies Aren’t Fallacies
Something rarely discussed that's important to recognize about "logical fallacies": in real-world situations, most of them are only SOMETIMES fallacies.
Here are a bunch of examples:
(1) Appeal to authority: some authorities ARE reliable. For example, ask a physicist about a well-established idea in physics, and you'll likely get the right answer.
(2) Bandwagon effect: lots of people believing something often is evidence for it being true. For example, lots of people saying they heard ...
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