- There are two boxes up for auction
- One contains a valuable diamond, the other is empty
- Both boxes are covered with various symbols and portents, but no symbol or portent corresponds with certainty to the presence of a diamond
- Let’s say there’s a clever arguer, hired by the owners of one of the boxes to show that their box has a diamond
- Clever arguer starts by writing, “And therefore, this is why the box contains a diamond.”
- The arguer then goes back through the evidence on that box and finds all the evidence in support of the box having the diamond and discards the evidence against the box containing the diamond
- However, the evidentiary entanglement between the box and the argument became fixed when the arguer wrote their argument at the bottom of the page, and was not affected by the evidence that the arguer discovered
- The evidence doesn’t affect the conclusion; instead the conclusion is chosen ahead of time, and the evidence which supports that conclusion is specifically chosen because it fits the conclusion
- Let’s say there’s another person, who is genuinely curious about the contents of the box
- This person writes down the distinguishing characteristics of both boxes
- Then, using their knowledge of probability, they look at all the evidence and come to a conclusion regarding which box likely has the diamond
- In this world, the evidence on the boxes does affect the conclusion, rather than the conclusion affecting the evidence
- Your effectiveness as a rationalist is determined by whether you write down your conclusion last or first
- Note: this is intended as a check on your own thinking and is not intended to be used as a fully-general counterargument against others
- Anosognosia is the condition of not knowing your own disability
- Seen in stroke victims with
- People with anosognosia deny even clearly visible disabilities, like blindness or paralysis and come up with increasingly implausible excuses
- Moreover, these excuses aren’t limited to the part of the body with the disability; patients will make excuses for parts of the body that aren’t affected by their disability under certain circumstances
- This points to anosognosia being a general failure of rationality
- Dr. Ramachandran posits two different interacting systems
- Apologist – tries to fit data to existing theories
- Revolutionary – once enough contradictory data has accumulated, the revolutionary creates a new theory
- Normally these two systems work in balance
- However, if a stroke takes the revolutionary offline, the brain loses its ability to update and generate new hypotheses
- This leads to the patient trying ever more desperately to fit the contradictory data to their own self-image
- The really strange thing is that squirting cold water into the patient’s left ear seems to temporarily “wake up” the revolutionary
- Patients will admit to their disability and will express confusion that they ever denied it
- However, the effect is temporary – once it fades, the patient will not only resume denying that they have a disability, but will also deny ever having admitted to the disability
- The reason anosognosia seems so strange is because we think of our intellect as being a propositional system which must be internally consistent
- However, conditions like anosognosia show that there is no reason that an intellect has to be internally consistent in its beliefs
- Rationality is a forward flow from evidence to conclusion – find the evidence first, then choose a conclusion which fits the evidence
- Rationalization is a backwards flow from conclusion to evidence – find the conclusion first, and then cherry-pick evidence to support the conclusion
- When you’re investigating something, make sure you’re engaging in rationality, not rationalization
- 1978 study on self-handicapping shows that people will voluntarily choose circumstances that make them perform poorly if those circumstances can then be used to excuse that poor performance
- In order to self-handicap, subjects must have both an accurate and an inaccurate assessment of their own abilities
- Must have inaccurate assessment in order to have something to protect by self-handicapping
- Must have accurage assessment in order to know that they have to self-handicap
- This is a different version of the belief in belief problem
- In both cases, the person has an accurate world-model somewhere in their mind, but isn’t either unwilling or unable to use that world-model
- Belief in religious faith and self-confidence appear to be two areas where we can be simultaneously right and wrong – we can hold an incorrect belief on the surface, but back it up with a correct belief to generate rationalizations
- Volunteers were told that there were two kinds of hearts – Type I and Type II
- People with Type II hearts supposedly live longer, healthier lives
- One group was told that people with Type II hearts had higher pain tolerance after exercise
- The other group was told that people Type II hearts had lower pain tolerance after exercise
- Members of the group which was told that people with Type II hearts had higher pain tolerance were able to hold their hands longer in ice water after exercising
- At some level these members believed that being able to hold to hold their hands longer in ice water affected whether they had a Type II heart
- However, when asked, these volunteers reversed the causation – said that it was their superior Type II hearts which gave them the ability to hold their hands longer in ice water, even though heart type is predestined
- This is similar to the self-handicapping literature – in both cases, people take an action which reinforces their self-image if and only if the intent behind the action doesn’t rise to the level of conscious thought
- In both cases, the action is apparently successful, self-image is protected, and the mind remains unaware of its true motives