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This resource is a work-in-progress

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The list of interventions to help counter Cognitive Biases

• In a debate, it helps to make people restate the opposite view. From Why facts don't change our minds

  • Perform ITT Idealogical Touring Test

• Know biases and acknowledge that you are subjected to them. Ask where I might miss it myself?

• Falsify your idea

  • Find credible sources that disagree with your idea.
  • Try to formulate own falsification: what types of things exist in reality that, if discovered, would prove my theory to be false?
  • Do Adversarial collaboration. Work with competent people who disagree with you.
  • Write your Antithesis

• Be proactive in stating your Epistemic status and confidence interval

• Explain all details of processes you think you understand

  In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently. Tip from Why facts don't change our minds

• When working in a group make sure there is an equal engagement and that all participants are engaged equally. This unbias people by sourcing individual perspective from many different sides What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team?

• Do User research, gather outsiders perspective on your positions

• Set up public forecasting scores (See Open Philanthropy setup) or forecasting tournaments

• Easy way to counter Planning overconfidence and My-side bias in general? Do Reference class forecasting

• Scott Alexander’s guess that meditation (and things like being healthy) may help with unbiasing: If you want to get out of a trapped prior, is … A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail.

  • If you want to get out of a trapped prior, the most promising source of hope is the psychotherapeutic tradition of treating phobias and PTSD. These people tend to recommend very gradual exposure to the phobic stimulus, sometimes with special gimmicks to prevent you from getting scared or help you "process" the information. A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail. Probably every mental health intervention (good diet, exercise, etc) does this a little. And this is super speculative, and you should feel free to make fun of me for even thinking about it, but sensory deprivation might do this too, for the same reason that your eyes become more sensitive in the dark.” Via Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

• In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point still stands. There may be people who believe in fake news the way they believe in leopards and chairs, but underlying many genuine-feeling endorsements is an understanding that they’re not exactly factual – via https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/dont-believe-what-theyre-telling-you-about-misinformation?_sp=9c1457e9-3ea2-4d39-a42d-08e0a940d53e.1714334048197

• Be kind because unkindness is a biasing force

Maybe

List of ideas that may be helpful

• Reversal – reverse the thesis (via Double crux bot )
  • Let's clarify the current crux: @pawel believes it's important for @Karolina to do X.
  • @pawel, if evidence showed that X is not important for @Karolina's success, would you change your recommendation?

Is correcting bias at scale possible?

Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? - LessWrong