I have been given to confirmation bias in a variety of ways, ranging from things I wanted to be true (love), to things I desperately hoped weren't true, but expected to be true anyway (also love, unrequited). Honestly, I'm more prone to the latter form of confirmation bias, expecting things to be going wrong as things like that always do.
I hope sharing your thoughts on bias, coming from someone as widely known to be solidly rational as you are, helps folks to wrassle their own biases into submission.
Thanks!
From this line, I take it that you view yourself either as more of a pessimist or at least that a pessimistic attitude is the more "realistic" one :-)
Thanks, I hope so as well, but for the most part, I'm very unsure just how much impact simply sharing these ideas will have as people are generally slow to make changes in the way they think about things.
But I have more hope for the information rating tools we're starting to build to address these kinds of problems, and I think it is important to start to lay out the reasons why I think these tools can be beneficial, divorced from a discussion of the tools themselves. In other words, I want to start by examining the problems, and then start looking at possible solutions (including simple ones such as I propose in this post that people can use today).
Sorry, I neglected to formally characterize myself. On cursory reflection, while I base my expectations of personal results on evidence, which suggests pessimism inform my expectations, I am a hopeless romantic, and preach a coming paradise born of decentralization of the means of production concatenated with the illimitable resources that we will gain access to as space travel develops and 3D printing disperses across the population.
The first 3D printed spaceship, Terran 1, was launched in March 2023 by Relativity Space. In the few short months since then several other manufacturers have adopted 3D printing to make spacecraft. While these highly specialized printers today cost ~$1M, it is difficult to reasonably expect that price won't drop rapidly and the ability to print with the exotic aluminum alloys spacecraft require won't soon be available to ordinary folks.
Regardless of what happens to me, I am very bullish on decentralization and the inconceivable prosperity our posterity will create with illimitable resources to develop in absolute freedom that will soon be possible.
Like I said, I'm a hopeless romantic.
Yep, I'm convinced, you are a hopeless romantic :-) Let's hope you're right.