A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “motivated reasoning”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott examines and rejects conflict theory (the idea that political disagreements come from material self-interest), arguing instead that political positions are primarily driven by psychological needs and identity rather than material interests.
Scott Alexander argues that even seemingly extreme media misinformation usually involves misleading presentation of true facts rather than outright fabrication, examining several reader-provided counterexamples.
Scott Alexander explores expert and reader comments on his post about motivated reasoning and reinforcement learning, discussing brain function, threat detection, and the implementation of complex behaviors.
Scott analyzes motivated reasoning as misapplied reinforcement learning, explaining how it might arise from the brain's mixture of reinforceable and non-reinforceable architectures.
Scott Alexander critiques the use of bias arguments in debates, explaining why they're often counterproductive and suggesting more constructive ways to address bias.
Scott Alexander examines how debates often revolve around vague concepts with positive or negative associations rather than specific claims, leading to logical fallacies and tribal thinking.
Scott argues against Eliezer's position that reversed stupidity is never intelligence, showing that observing many people believe something for bad reasons can help identify 'popular claims' that people assert regardless of truth, which lets you properly discount future assertions of those claims.
Scott argues that people make better decisions when evaluating issues in isolation rather than viewing them as symbols of larger political narratives, using examples from the Duke lacrosse case, environmental regulation debates, and gender politics to illustrate how overarching narratives distort judgment of individual cases.
Scott calculates that on exams penalizing wrong answers at half the reward for correct ones, guessing always has positive expected value, but none of his intelligent classmates would accept this logic despite clear explanations.
Scott defends a 'soft positivism' in which meaningful statements can be reduced to testable claims, and argues that statements that resist such reduction, like 'Islam is a religion of peace', often smuggle in emotion and prejudice.