“[...] the only way to get objective data is to have institutions that assume objectivity doesn’t exist. It’s not enough to force scientists and doctors to declare conflicts of interest, because our biases seep in anyway. Rather, we need to do a better job of funding truly independent studies and approaching with extra skepticism those that are not. We should also encourage researchers to make their raw data public, as Samuel Morton did, so that others can check it. As Stephen Jay Gould proved all too well, men are inveterate mismeasurers.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397771567839728.html

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“Cryptocurrency brings new challenges to the table. The government can’t see the wealth of an individual, nor their inflow or outflow of funds, not with any amount of applied force.

I know a lot of individuals in government will react with normalcy bias to this statement and say “but we have to!”. It doesn’t matter if you have to. You can’t. Period.” http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/

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How to build a religion: “FANCY founding a religion? Keen to reform a flagging faith? Here a few tips on how to attract and retain followers, thus ensuring that your gospel spreads far and wide, affording spiritual solace to as many souls as possible.

At the outset, you must realise that success is unlikely if you go wholly against the grain of human nature. Granted, religion is all about forging the perfect man, or at least ensuring that, as far as possible, he lives up to divine expectations. But preternatural power has forged man in such a way that he will swallow some of your ideas about how to achieve this more easily than others. [...]” http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/science_and_faiths

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A new study on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There’s a relatively linear decline between the two points.

http://lsolum.typepad.com/files/danziger-levav-avnaim-pnas-2011.pdf

Cf. http://lesswrong.com/lw/58y/the_bias_you_didnt_expect/

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CIA on cognitive biases & tools of thinking: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/index.html

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Policy Analysis with Incredible Certitude “Abstract – Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical unsupported assumptions or leaps of logic. Then the certitude of policy analysis is not credible. I develop a typology of incredible analytical practices and gives illustrative cases. I call these practices conventional certitude, dueling certitudes, conflating science and advocacy, wishful extrapolation, illogical certitude, and media overreach.” http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~cfm754/policy_certitude.pdf

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Cognitive biases&global risks&reduction of risks:

Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks: “All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom, require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villainies. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks. [...]” http://singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction: “In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts. [...]” http://www.paforge.com/files/articles/Reducing%20the%20Risk%20of%20Human%20Extinction.pdf

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