www.greaterwrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right

One of the chief morals of the mathematical analogy between thermodynamics and cognition is that the constraints of probability are inescapable; probability may be a subjective state of mind, but the laws of probability are harder than steel.

[…] Here's a little experiment: Smash an egg on the floor. The rule that says that the egg won't spontaneously reform and leap back into your hand is merely probabilistic. A suggestion, if you will.

[…] It may help to think of it this way—if you still have some lingering intuition that uncertain beliefs are not authoritative:

In reality, there may be a very small chance that the egg spontaneously reforms. But you cannot expect it to reform. You must expect it to smash. Your mandatory belief is that the egg's probability of spontaneous reformation is ~0. Probabilities are not certainties, but the laws of probability are theorems.

If you doubt this, try dropping the egg on the floor a few decillion times.

–www.greaterwrong.com/posts/zFuCxbY9E2E8HTbfZ/perpetual-motion-beliefs

A popular idea of "rationality" is Spock from Star Trek. Yet Spock is much more like a sub-par human statistician than a rational being, if you follow Cognitive science's definition of rationality. He's merely the autist of the TV-show, the straw Vulcan, and if anyone is the rationalist, it's Captain Kirk. Why? He makes the decision that saves everyone's butts, over and over again.

The Hollywood-Rationalist Spock says something like: "our probability of survival if we go into that nebula is 2.234%". Then Kirk says to go into it anyway, and nine episodes out of ten, the Enterprise is fine! Clearly he knew something Spock didn't.

Kirk doesn't survive despite irrationality; on the contrary, because he survives so reliably, you can see that his choices are pretty rational.

Rationality is about winning. It's making the decision that saves the Enterprise; the decision with the greatest chance of success, whatever you mean by "success", and no matter if you don't have an exact idea of the numbers involved.

It's not about ignoring your emotions and ignoring what your "gut" tells you in favour of a deliberate probability or utility calculation (though it can be!). If your gut has been reliable in the past in similar situations, why would you think it's not rational to listen to it?

Spock is not how a rationalist sounds… but he's often what an aspiring rationalist sounds like. The final form is Kirk.

Which leads us to another trope, emotionlessness. Yudkowsky:

For my part, I label an emotion as "not rational" if it rests on mistaken beliefs, or rather, on mistake-producing epistemic conduct: "If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm."

(www.greaterwrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQekWNnmE6Q/if-you-demand-magic-magic-won-t-help)

If you need to live in a world with magic to take your life somewhere great and fulfil your dreams – 'if only magic were real' – you may be engaging in a fantasy that's comfortably out of reach so you need not even try. Realize that being in a world with magic would make it no longer special, the same way you treat lightbulbs as nothing special in this world. Thus, if you weren't studying difficult topics here, you wouldn't be studying magic there, as it'd be just another difficult topic that nobody regards as interesting. "What do you study?" "Magic." "Cool. I study art." "Bachelor's degree or…?"

Thus: if you're the sort of person to demand a magical world, actually living in that magical world wouldn't change anything, so what's the point?

What's a better way of staying up to date, than following news?

Follow blogs by the sort of people who like to try to explain to laymen. For example, Andrew Gelman's blog for topics surrounding statistics. Or simplystatistics.org/posts/2020-04-29-amplifying-people-i-trust-on-covid-19/

Following news sucks because

• The selection of news you see today is a nonrepresentative selection of what happened today, muddling the waters for your Availability heuristic and inner simulator.
• The selection of news you see today is what I might call counterfactually-arbitrary… I mean that from your perspective, a given day looks perfectly compatible with many different possible sets of news articles, without changing which world you live in. The information has low value because you don't have any idea of the process underlying why this ended up in the news and not other stuff, even if you trusted the editor.

• For academic topics, reliably they're just plain wrong (see Gell-Mann amnesia)! Perhaps it'd be worth reading if the news is actually good, but you can't judge this for yourself in most domains.

  From Gell-Mann Amnesia:

  If you or your company has EVER been the primary subject of a newspaper article, you know exactly what Crichton is talking about. The article is simply wrong. Not just wrong in minor detail, but wrong in motivation, cause, implication, fundamental facts … everything.

Also you need to read www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rvpEF2mBLeZE9j53n/how-to-bounded-distrust.

A trick may be to follow content-producers that don't put the idea of news itself as their product. Direct news made sense in the era of newspapers, it doesn't in the internet era. By its very nature, news will find its way to you in the course of your normal interactions with people and what they've written.

In fact, waiting for them this way ensures relevance to you, and it's more likely you hear it when you're working on something associated and thus you may be in a better position to act in response to the news.

I suspect there's one field for which you'll still want to explicitly follow news: geopolitics. Or new laws. You don't hear about all of it from your friends, and sometimes it's relevant sooner than later.