Aug 5, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition
Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom.
My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that’s absurd!
But isn’t the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias? Didn’t lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don’t I specifically believe in things many people have found self-evidently absurd (eg the multiverse, AI risk)? Shouldn’t I be more careful about “this sounds silly to me, so I’m going to make fun of it”?