In early August, 20 youth from across Canada & the US were flown down to California for a week-long seminar series covering topics around rationality, machine learning, statistics, and how one can go about life doing the most good.
I'm still unsure of what exactly made the experience so worthwhile, but I'm confident it's some linear combination of the vibrant, intellectual community and that environment driving meaningful ideas. Those are not orthogonal bases, but there was an excess of exciting ideas put forth, whether at 10 pm in a hot tub or 7 am on a calm stroll through the woods.
One of which was the thinking behind how one should go about developing the most precise map of reality. Put in simpler terms, how do you ensure you're right with the plethora of beliefs you hold?
Briefly put, leave your beliefs open to being updated, and update them slowly as you gather data points from the world. We hate ambiguity, so we often relax into having binary beliefs. Either X is 100% true, or it's false.
But we often forget, we're not infinitely wise. Our map of the world is flawed. So assigning 100% or 0% probabilities to any belief outside of propositional logic is likely foolish. Instead, approach the world with humility and welcome the discomfort of holding probabilistic beliefs. Even superforecasters start with largely indeterminate probability distributions, which slowly evolve given more data points to a stance like, "I'm 80% confidence that X is true given supporting arguments/confidence in Y + Z both being true."
To find out how well-calibrated your hypothesis engine is, do this 10-mins assessment.
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