According to my own judgment, I usually did better on predictions about race, and worse on other things. An optimistic take on this is that race has b

Don't second-guess yourself!

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2021-05-22 11:00:04

According to my own judgment, I usually did better on predictions about race, and worse on other things. An optimistic take on this is that race has become so emotionally charged that most people have kind of crazy beliefs about it, which makes them easier to beat. A pessimistic take is that race has become so emotionally charged that everyone including me has crazy beliefs, which makes me a more biased judge and lets me award myself points more shamelessly than I would do anywhere else….

Did my liberal bias lead me to underestimate Trump? I'm not sure. He did better than I expected on the economy and on not starting wars. But he did worse than I expected on getting any of his policies enacted. Maybe this is what I should expect if I was suffering from liberal bias — maybe the liberal narrative was "Trump is an evil supervillain who will successfully complete all kinds of terrible things", which made me underestimate how well Trump would do on things I liked, but overestimate how well he would do on things I hated.

Scott Alexander is a rationalist, in a specific, recent sense of the word, and this is an example of rationalists’ thinking style. They put numbers on their predictions, and evaluate their performance. They know about cognitive psychology and can namecheck their own biases. They “steelman” their opponents’ arguments to make sure they are being fair.