rationality

Here’s an interesting scientific paper about Palestinians and Israeli settlers. The experiments asked each group questions intended to judge how willing they were to compromise. Then, they asked the questions again, but threw in a side-offer, for example of economic aid or third-power security guarantees. Interestingly, all the groups split into two identifiable types; some…

Read More I don’t need you, I can’t buy you, I can’t hurt you…

What have we here? Via Spencer Ackerman: David Wurmser, trying to sketch the wiring in his head on a really big piece of paper. The spider chart was meant “to create a strategic picture, and that strategic picture is the foundation of policy change,” Wurmser said. “It helped you visualize, because if you saw, say,…

Read More All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy

“Sir” Ian Blair addresses the troops: “Our approach will be one of humility. On 22nd July 2005, we confidently believed that our systems of command, of surveillance and of firearms intervention were among the best in the world. However, they failed in response to a previously unforeseen circumstance, suicide bombers on the run.” Well, it’s…

Read More Sir Ian Blair, Sir Ian Blair! The Lord save me from Sir Ian Blair!

One of the many wonderful things about the Web is that its hypertext structure not only permits us to navigate it, and to invoke external resources (scripts, graphics, etc), but also to measure relevance and authority. Google’s killer insight was of course just this; to use links as votes for the relevance of a given…

Read More Anti-Link

How did a set of medical techniques and institutional styles with absolutely no therapeutic value survive for 2,500 years from ancient Greece to the early 20th century – even though the scientific knowledge required to demolish them had been available since the 1600s? This is the question David Wootton’s “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since…

Read More Review: “Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates”, David Wootton

I’ve gradually become addicted to Overcoming Bias, and specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky’s contributions to it. And it struck me, reading the reports on the de Menezes trial, that a good dose of this blog could have done the Metropolitan Police a power of good. Specifically, members of the police command staff recalled hearing a radio message…

Read More Death By Bias