Shorts

Terminology Clarification Regarding the “Subconscious”

I’m enjoying reading Why I Left Orthodox Medicine: Healing for the 21st Century by Derrick Lonsdale. I noticed that he uses the word “subconscious” differently than I do. I wanted to clarify my terminology in case anyone is confused. In Critical Fallibilism (CF) essays, “subconscious” refers to the part

Shorts

Peer Review Is Worse than the Internet

The internet can be really smart and effective sometimes. We’ve seen examples where impressive things have been figured out by people on internet platforms like Reddit, Facebook, TikTok or 4chan. In the Netflix documentary Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, a Facebook group helps catch a

Shorts

Peer Review and Appeals to Authority

Suppose you write a blog post arguing a point. Some readers will reply (or, worse, think it without saying it): “If that was true, you would get it published in a peer reviewed journal. If you don’t do that, it’s because you’re wrong.” The assumption here is

Shorts

Peer Review Does Private, Elite Gatekeeping

Peer review prevents some ideas from being published. That’s a significant part of the point. What is published is supposed to already be filtered or gatekept to only be high quality ideas. So the public doesn’t even get to see most ideas. A small group of people have

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Ignoring Criticism and Peer Review

In peer review, part of the idea is you (the article author) don’t get to just arbitrarily ignore the criticisms of the reviewer. You’re supposed to address the issues in some way. But then once you publish, you mostly get to arbitrarily ignore your critics. The peer reviewers

Shorts

Paths Forward Could Replace Some Peer Review

Peer review lacks transparency. Paths Forward commonly involves rational, critical discussions on publicly-readable internet forums. That enables transparency and some other advantages like wider participation. Article authors could be expected to address criticisms. This is like how people have recommended a norm of sharing raw data along with articles. I

Shorts

Advocating Public Peer Review

I criticize peer review for lacking transparency. Then I talked about friendly, private editing, which is fine, and is usually used for papers before the peer review process. Private editing is fine because no one is asked to trust that it ensured high quality. It isn’t an attempt to

Shorts

Private Editing and Peer Review

I criticized peer review for lacking transparency. I suggested the process should take place publicly. (I have no objection to anonymizing the discussion until the review process is complete to help reduce bias during the discussion. I’d suggest de-anonymizing it afterwards though.) Do I ever have someone edit one

Shorts

Peer Review Lacks Transparency

Who peer reviewed an academic paper? That’s secret. More importantly, what criticisms did the peers reviewers come up with? That’s secret. What changes were made to the paper due to peer review? That’s secret. When your error correction process is secret, the public can’t see how

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Allocating Intellectual Attention

There are a few standard ways intellectual attention is allocated to ideas. There are social networks. Having allies and fans helps with getting attention. There are gatekeepers and lots of people follow their curated output. There’s popularity or virality. Saying stuff people like and share, or which seems good

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Low Quality Literature Is Hard To Discuss

I recently read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I liked it. I had been told it’s horrible. The book and its author have been demonized by right-wingers including the Ayn Rand Institute. It’s a really famous and controversial book. It had a significant influence on political policies. A

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Meta Criticism and Unstated Premises

It’s often hard to engage with the literature on a topic because the literature is bad in meta ways. You can criticize the methodology and the glaring omissions, but it’s hard to write about the actual object-level topic. For example, suppose some economics literature didn’t have a

Shorts

Followup for Food Packaging Grammar

Let’s talk more about my post Food Packaging Grammar Error. Summarizing the post, I commented on frozen microwave meal instructions stating “peel film back enough to stir, replace film and cook […]”. I pointed out that it doesn’t say to stir. The steps are to peel, replace and cook.

Applications

Food Packaging Grammar Error

A frozen microwave meal has a grammar error in the instructions. After initial microwaving it says to: peel film back enough to stir, replace film and cook on HIGH for an additional 1-1 ½ minutes Do you see the error? Did you see the error automatically? If it requires conscious analysis

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Delegating Mental Work

People often try to become really smart by optimizing their conscious thinking. This can only take you so far. Conscious brainpower is a limited resource. To be a really effective thinker, you have to consider how to use things outside of your conscious mind to help you be smarter. What

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Question-Based Critical Fallibilism Epistemology Outline

This is a brief, question-based outline of some Critical Fallibilist epistemology. What is knowledge? Information that’s effective for (adapted to) a purpose. It has the appearance of design. It’s not arbitrary nor random. How is knowledge created? Evolution (replication with variation and selection). The explanation of why evolution

Applications

AI Alignment and Openness to Debate: A Twitter Example

I’ll analyze a real example to illustrate some Critical Fallibilist thinking about openness to debate. I replied to Eliezer Yudkowsky (an AI alignment thought leader) on Twitter: I'm an expert on Critical Rationalism. You ignored my criticism over 10 years ago. I don't think you'll debate me re AI

Applications

Example Debate with AI Researcher about Popper

This is a fictional dialog which stands on its own but also follows my article Error Correction and AI Alignment. The main goal isn’t realism; it’s to illustrate some of Critical Fallibilism’s thinking about rationality and debate. The Debate Begins Elliot Temple: Do you agree that your

Applications

Example Debate with AI Researcher

This is a fictional example of what a debate could look like if an AI researcher were willing to debate and were unusually honest. It’s meant to be more illustrative than realistic. It can be read on its own, but it’s also a follow up to my article

Applications

Error Correction and AI Alignment

There are calls to pause or shut down AI development. I want to stay out of the widespread, tribalist, parochial political bickering because I think those activities are unproductive. But I can use these issues for examples to apply Critical Fallibilism (CF) philosophy to. How could people approach the issues

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Actors and Subconscious Automatizations

There are different acting methods which relate to different ways of dealing with subconscious automatizations. Some actors try to get into their character’s mindset and immerse themselves in the part. They’re trying to adjust a bunch of automatizations and intuitions so they actually become more like the character.

Applications

Analyzing a Grammar Ambiguity Using Variables and Trees

Let’s look at a grammatically ambiguous sentence fragment by me. This is a simple example of analyzing text, which is common philosophical activity. For context, I wrote CF newsletter titles and descriptions: We’ll analyze this text: Infrequent updates and links to Elliot's work This is a sentence fragment

Shorts

Overthinking and Not Knowing What Success Is

A common cause of overthinking is that you’re confused, so you keep trying to do better, but you’re not really sure what’s better, so you stay confused. If you’re doing something that you don’t know how to do, you may keep retrying unsuccessfully. Then you

Shorts

Overthinking and Perfectionism

Sometimes people get stuck overthinking things when writing or making decisions. This can be caused by perfectionism. People may keep trying to make their writing or plan more and more perfect. CF and Theory of Constraints (TOC) ideas about goals, variance, limiting factors and excess capacity can help with perfectionism.

Shorts

Overthinking and the Subconscious

Sometimes people get stuck overthinking when writing or making decisions. This often means they’re relying too much on conscious effort and too little on subconscious effort. They get stuck partly because conscious effort is a very limited resource so they don’t have enough. I’m only talking about