Rene Descartes (1596–1650) thought that when we're told a proposition, we would first comprehend what it meant, then consider it, and finally accept or reject it.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) disagreed: he thought that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve it if upon consideration we reject it.

Descartes' suggestion sounded more logical and intuitive, so that's what most philosophers have assumed true, but as of the 21st century the evidence is in: Spinoza was right.

Gilbert, Tafarodi, Malone paper: You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read. See www.greaterwrong.com/posts/TiDGXt3WrQwtCdDj3/do-we-believe-everything-we-re-told?hide-nav-bars=true

A takeaway: you may believe something outrageous if you're told it while distracted with some other cognitive work, so that your normal filters never apply.

• Here is a point in favor of decoupling over contextualizing (Communication cultures): reserve the mental space for your filters to actually do their job, so that you don't let pass an insane sub-proposition.
• Be more careful when you expose yourself to unreliable information, especially if doing something else at the time. Don't glance at that newspaper in the supermarket…

l

• Terminal values ≠ instrumental values
  • Expected utility vs. utility (see EY)
• "Snow" vs. snow
• Belief-in-belief vs. belief itself

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_testing

• ~900 Black powder
• 1440 Printing press
• ~1460 Firearms
• Cristoforo Colombo finds the West Indies
• 1543 Heliocentric model re-proposed
• 1604 Kepler realizes that planets orbit in elliptical routes
• Newton
• 1698 First commercial steam engine
• 1775-83 American Revolution
• 1789-99 French Revolution
• 1796 Edward Jenner discovers the vaccine
• 1839 First Opium War
• ~1840 Electrical telegraphs supersede semaphores
• 1842 General anaesthesia
• 1847 Semmelweis discovers the benefit of hygiene
• 1859 Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
• 1861-65 USA civil war
• 1868 Edo Period ends
• 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev creates modern periodic table of elements
• 1882 Start of electrically lighting streets and homes
• 1903 Radiation discovered
• 1905 Einstein publishes relativity theory
• 1910 Russell's Principia Mathematicia
• 1913 Bohr model of atoms
• ~1914 Last use of metal breastplates
• 1917 October Revolution
• 1919 Eddington confirms that light bends, thus the relativity theory
• 1919 Treaty of Versailles
• 1920 Commercial radio
• 1927 Heisenberg uncertainty principle
• 1927 Fifth Solvay Conference (quantum physics widely recognized around now)
• 1927-49 Chinese Civil War
• 1930 Karl Landsteiner discovers blood types, allowing safe blood transfusion
• ~1930 wider use of null-hypothesis significance testing
• 1931 Gödel's incompleteness theorems
• 1957 Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation
• 1958 European Communities
• 1960 McCarthy discovers Lisp
• 1968 Quarks found
• 1969 ARPANET created
• Transition from teletypes to storage-tube monitors
• 1974 Kahneman & Tversky publishes Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
• 1980 First clinically useful MRI image
• 1990 Markov chain Monte Carlo
• 1991 Kahle & Berners-Lee create WWW
• 1991 Soviet Union dismantled
• 1993 European Union
• 1993 Eternal September