Introduction
Welcome to ClearerThinking.org's mini-course on interpreting evidence. Let's get started.
Have you ever felt absolutely certain that you were right about something, only to discover that you were wrong? If so, there's a good chance that you misinterpreted the evidence. This mini-course will train you to think more clearly about evidence and how it works, so you can come to the right conclusions when it counts.
In the video below, Julia Galef, the president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, offers an introduction to Bayes' Rule — the statistical law that describes the way evidence really works.
As Julia pointed out in the video, it can be very difficult for the human brain to build beliefs that accurately reflect the facts. Our mini-course will teach you a simple trick, based on Bayes' Rule, that will help you to gauge the strength of evidence more accurately on a day-to-day basis. This trick is truly powerful. If you master it, you'll become better able to decide which ideas are worth believing in, and how strong that belief should be. This clarity can be of great use to you in your professional life, in personal relationships, and whenever your confidence in your theories affects your behavior.
Judging by the people who have taken this course in the past, you will likely need between 30 and 65 minutes to complete it. 50% of the people who took it finished it in 40 minutes or less.