A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “political bias”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott examines the Metaculus Threat To Democracy Index, which uses crowdsourced forecasting to measure democratic health, discussing its advantages over traditional expert-based indices and its vulnerabilities to manipulation and selection bias.
Scott Alexander attempts to replicate a poll claiming high rates of COVID vaccine deaths, finds much lower rates, and concludes such polls are unreliable due to bias.
Scott Alexander evaluates predictions about the Russia-Ukraine war, analyzing the performance of prediction markets and individual pundits.
Scott Alexander explores the concept of 'trapped priors' as a fundamental problem in rationality, explaining how it leads to persistent biases and suggesting potential solutions.
Scott Alexander analyzes a survey on readers' estimated probabilities of Kavanaugh's guilt, finding significant partisan differences and no clear consensus even with probabilistic thinking.
A collection of interesting links spanning topics from CRISPR technology to economic studies, with Scott's commentary on each item.
The author analyzes results of a prediction contest about American political opinions, revealing participants' inaccuracies and biases in estimating current views and changes over time.
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.