Comments on: Sincerity Is Overrated

By: sender

sender — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:15:13 +0000

You will never find a procedural solution to your self-biases. The problem is that no matter how much “more objective” than your initial judgment you try to become, you can never achieve an objective viewpoint. This means that in a way, each judgment is an initial judgment and subject to the same degree of distortion.

Nor is ambivalence/paralysis a refuge, necessarily. Humans tend to regard opposed choices as equal by virtue of being opposed; we’re inclined toward dualism. Which is to say, enforced inaction or lopsided compromise are also products of predictable biases.

The only way to be sure you’re right about a given question is to be right.

By: Adam Ierymenko

Adam Ierymenko — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:32:40 +0000

Our biases probably exist to overcome what the first poster discusses: ambivalence and inaction.

Consider a human species that ponders the way you suggest, and then consider another species that acts even if action is reckless on occasion.

Which one will come home from the hunt empty handed more often?

But nevertheless you are correct. While being biased toward doing might be good on a hunt (where most of our evolution in this area took place), there are many many situations where it’s very bad in a modern context. Our biases toward wishful thinking, overcommitment, etc. are probably yet another example of something that was adaptive in prehistory but can be very maladaptive in a modern context.

By: tobbic

tobbic — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:08:40 +0000

“the problem is people hold themselves to a lower standard than they hold others.”
Is it a form of social strategy to require more of others than you require of yourself. For you it might be desirable for others to deviate from their optimum. So if a person tells you “you should do x” it’s relevant to check if the person is itself doing x.

By: Unknown

Unknown — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 06:37:49 +0000

As I implied above, I don’t understand how this post is supposed to be consistent (which I presume it is, since it has the same author) as the post on the overratedness of morality. If the point of the latter was that people want to do what they want, so that’s what they’re going to do, whether or not they should do it, and whether or not they have good reasons for doing it, the same thing will apply here.

Just as people do what gets them what they want, so they accept the beliefs that they think will help get them what they want, whether or not they should accept these beliefs, and whether or not they have good reason to accept these beliefs.

By: dr. zeuss

dr. zeuss — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:08:58 +0000

A defender of sincerity might say that she is justified in acting on a belief if she sincerely believes she’s checked out possible biases. To which a meta-Robin Hanson might reply that you need to look at the biases inherent in our self-bias checks.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:53:38 +0000

Or is it right to be a cynic? Everybody lies, you can’t trust people.

http://hanson.gmu.edu/metacynic.html
http://hanson.gmu.edu/innocence.html

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:02:57 +0000

Hal, yes, if the boss incorrectly imagines what an incompetent son would look and feel like, then attending more to such things won’t help him.

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:22:43 +0000

This post made sense to me but I got lost on the last sentence, the advice to “try very hard to consider what you might have seen and felt if the world were other than you think it is.” Is this supposed to be a generalized recipe for overcoming bias? What specific kinds of differences in the world are we supposed to consider? Factual differences, i.e. things we might be wrong about? I would think that bias is less a matter of mistakes about facts and more a matter of judging evidence incorrectly.

Let’s take one of those examples above, someone pushing his son for a job opening. Let’s suppose that he actually is biased, and the son would not be as good a candidate as the person has convinced himself he is. Now he is supposed to fix this bias by considering what he would have seen and felt if the world were different than he thought, i.e. (I suppose) if the son were not actually a very good candidate. Well we know, constructing this scenario, that the world really is different, the son really is not a good candidate. So our guy is invited to consider, hypothetically, a situation which we know is actually true. The truth is that if the world were different than he thought (which it is), he would have seen and felt exactly what he did see and feel. But he drew a wrong conclusion anyway. So when he imagines what he would have seen and felt if his son were a worse candidate, he must imagine events which were less favorable to his son than what actually happened. But then, since those events did not happen, he seemingly has no grounds to correct his mistaken belief about the son’s talents.

I am probably applying this advice incorrectly, because I don’t see how it would be particularly helpful in terms of overcoming biases.

By: Unknown

Unknown — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:21:53 +0000

As Robin said in “Morality is Overrated,” people want to get what they want, not only what they should. And many of the things that people want will be impeded if they hold only justified beliefs. So they don’t want to hold only justified beliefs, but also many unjustified ones.

By: BillK

BillK — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:22:52 +0000

Oh, this is an old one.

“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

Jean Giraudoux (1882 – 1944) French “dramatist, novelist, diplomat”
In ‘Murphy’s Law Book Two’ by quoted by A. Bloch.
Also attributed to Samuel Goldwyn and George Burns and Daniel Schorr and probably many more.