User:FloridaMan1776
I'm a Florida-based Wikipedia enthusiast. Like for millions of other people, Wikipedia has been an indispensable part of my life so I want to help improve it.
Some things I'm particularly into:
- Aviation and spaceflight have been close to my heart since childhood. I'm interested in just about everything aerospace but there are some areas of it I'm particularly into:
- Safety, especially what we can learn from air & space accidents
- Human factors
- Crew resource management
- Engineering
- Overlapping with aerospace, is my interest in defense/national security. As you might imagine, I love learning about military aircraft but I'm also into military history, strategy, and equipment that doesn't fly. Some more specific defense fields I'm interested in:
- Counterterrorism
- Counterinsurgency
- Nuclear strategy
- Weapons of mass destruction, particularly biological weapons
- Missile defense
- Logistics
- Business & Investing
- Economics
- Value investing
- Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Berkshire Hathaway
- Behavioral economics, especially as it relates to misperception.
- Stoicism
- Science generally
- Medicine
- Clinical trials
- The design, interpretation, and particularly misinterpretation of observational health & medical studies
- Infectious diseases, especially prion diseases and viruses
Potential Sources of Bias
Although it'd be nice to decide that I'm always an unbiased, rational observer of the world, I know that's not true and will never be true. But I try to be aware of my own biases and to disclose them, if only so that others can challenge me so that I can re-evaluate my conclusions.
- US-centricity & western-centricity - I'm a patriotic American. I generally think that the basic principles of the world's western liberal democracies - freedom of speech, market economies, fair elections, etc - are the best social/governmental models for the humans within their borders. Perhaps more importantly, I view these principals as worth defending. Luckily, I don't live in a society where patriotism = not criticizing the government.
- Humanism & globalism - This might mitigate the risks of viewing the world from a western perspective. I believe in human rights. I want humans, wherever they may be, to have the best chance possible to live happy, healthy lives.
- Lack of belief in the supernatural - I am not religious nor do I believe in the supernatural. When extraordinary phenomena occur, I'll either take the scientific theory or leave it at "I don't know".
- High standards for evidence - For me, this is most often relevant when looking at health or climate research. The risk here is that I become an evidentiary nihilist: nothing is considered strong enough evidence! A couple examples could help illustrate my point:
- Nutrition research - since I was a kid, my mom would say stuff like "eat your blueberries, they found that they help your brain!". When I started digging into the actual studies as an adult, I realized that, although there were a plethora of nutrition studies but they all had weak study designs. E.g.:
- Small sample sizes. Possible because
- Nutrition research - since I was a kid, my mom would say stuff like "eat your blueberries, they found that they help your brain!". When I started digging into the actual studies as an adult, I realized that, although there were a plethora of nutrition studies but they all had weak study designs. E.g.:
That said, one of my "biases" is a desire for truth, even if those truths are uncomfortable.