How to be unbiased?

Is there anything related to data bias and belief, how much knowledge and a higher intelligence can be helpful in fighting cognitive bias?  There are many skeptics, or believers, who claim that they have no perceived bias and see no rationality in the opposition. What makes them believe so and do people really escape bias?

[Laird]

There's the Less Wrong site, which has an edited series Rationality: A-Z. I haven't read it, but a friend of mine is a fan of the site.

There's the Less Wrong site, which has an edited series Rationality: A-Z. I haven't read it, but a friend of mine is a fan of the site.

Looking over this site it is one for all whom are certain psi is real or whom know a particular philosophical position is the correct one should read.

Looking over this site it is one for all whom are certain psi is real or whom know a particular philosophical position is the correct one should read.

The author certainly isn't a fan of parapsychology:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Au7kvRA...hic-powers
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRFytjvR...es-psychic
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDM...y-the-data

I had to smile at one of the comments*:
"There's a particular field in which you have to do this all the time: Parapsychology, in which people with PhD credentials somehow manage to coax absurd results from apparently impeccable experimental procedures. Daryl Bem is a good example, as is Diane Hennesy [Hennacy] Powell."

(Edit for clarification: I mean this is a comment by a member of the site. It's not part of one of the posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky.)

Let's not forget Less Wrong thinks Roko's Basilisk is a real problem, or at least thought so at one time.

Roko, for his part, put the blame on LessWrong for spurring him to the idea of the Basilisk in the first place: “I wish very strongly that my mind had never come across the tools to inflict such large amounts of potential self-harm,” he wrote.

Not sure how rational that is, heh...though it does show us where absurd ideas like the physicalist faith, uploading your mind, and multiverse as a way to escape the observer in QM get you.

That said you can learn a decent amount of rational thinking from Less Wrong, though from what I read he has less space given to his absurd ideas in his fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality so might be better to start there.

Personally I'd start with Nagel's The View From Nowhere and the Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments.

[Laird]

Ah, thanks for the very big caveats, guys. My friend who recommended the site to me some years back (I only dipped my toes into it) is an atheist psi skeptic (and presumably a physicalist too), so that all fits...

Ah, thanks for the very big caveats, guys. My friend who recommended the site to me some years back (I only dipped my toes into it) is an atheist psi skeptic (and presumably a physicalist too), so that all fits...

I still think you can learn a lot from Less Wrong, just that at some point he seems to have gone off the deep end.

And I even visit Rational Wiki for things as well, I just keep in mind they have a bias and try to check re: paranormal stuff with Skeptical about Skeptics and the Psi Encyclopedia.

But I think that bias is just something that comes from having 1st person POVs given that even those that speak about bias often slide in their own fallacies and biases in favor of their own beliefs. The View From Nowhere is an asymptotic aspiration, not something we can reach save perhaps in mystical experiences...