How To Actually Change Your Mind

How to Actually Change Your Mind is the second book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is the edited version of a series of blog posts in "the Sequences", and covers the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality: triumphing over confirmation bias and motivated cognition.

How to Actually Change Your Mind contains seven sequences of essays. These are all collected in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies ebook, but the essay names below are also linked to the original blog posts.

The previous book in the series is Map and Territory, and the next book is The Machine in the Ghost.

 

 

E. Overly Convenient Excuses

46. The Proper Use of Humility

47. The Third Alternative

48. Lotteries: A Waste of Hope

49. New Improved Lottery

50. But There's Still A Chance, Right?

51. The Fallacy of Gray

52. Absolute Authority

53. How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

54. Infinite Certainty

55. 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

56. Your Rationality is My Business

F. Politics and Rationality

57. Politics is the Mind-Killer

58. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

59. The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality

60. Correspondence Bias

61. Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

62. Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence

63. Argument Screens Off Authority

64. Hug the Query

65. Rationality and the English Language

66. Human Evil and Muddled Thinking

G. Against Rationalization

67. Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

68. Update Yourself Incrementally

69. One Argument Against An Army

70. The Bottom Line

71. What Evidence Filtered Evidence?

72. Rationalization

73. A Rational Argument

74. Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points

75. Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation

76. Fake Justification

77. Is That Your True Rejection?

78. Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies

79. Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups

80. Dark Side Epistemology

H. Against Doublethink

81. Singlethink

82. Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased

83. No, Really, I've Deceived Myself

84. Belief in Self-Deception

85. Moore's Paradox

86. Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive

I. Seeing with Fresh Eyes

87. Anchoring and Adjustment

88. Priming and Contamination

89. Do We Believe Everything We're Told?

90. Cached Thoughts

91. The 'Outside the Box' Box

92. Original Seeing

93. Stranger Than History

94. The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

95. The Virtue of Narrowness

96. How to Seem (and Be) Deep

97. We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think

98. Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

99. The Genetic Fallacy

J. Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor

100. The Affect Heuristic

101. Evaluability and Cheap Holiday Shopping

102. Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism

103. The Halo Effect

104. Superhero Bias

105. Mere Messiahs

106. Affective Death Spirals

107. Resist the Happy Death Spiral

108. Uncritical Supercriticality

109. Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

110. When None Dare Urge Restraint

111. The Robbers Cave Experiment

112. Every Cause Wants to be a Cult

113. Guardians of the Truth

114. Guardians of the Gene Pool

115. Guardians of Ayn Rand

116. Two Cult Koans

117. Asch's Conformity Experiment

118. On Expressing Your Concerns

119. Lonely Dissent

120. Cultish Countercultishness

K. Letting Go

121. The Importance of Saying "Oops"

122. The Crackpot Offer

123. Just Lose Hope Already

124. The Proper Use of Doubt

125. You Can Face Reality

126. The Meditation on Curiosity

127. No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws

128. Leave a Line of Retreat

129. Crisis of Faith

130. The Ritual