Overcoming Bias

Cheap Wine Tastes Fine

Cheap wines taste just as good as expensive ones:

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.

So why do so many people have the opposite impression?  And how much more data would it take to convince them they have been wrong?  HT to Daniel Houser.

Added: The key question: does wine taste training make you enjoy some wines more, or other wines less?   And is any added enjoyment just the pleasure of knowing you can distinguish something others cannot? 

Lawful Creativity

Previously in Series:  Recognizing Intelligence

Creativity, we've all been told, is about Jumping Out Of The System, as Hofstadter calls it (JOOTSing for short).  Questioned assumptions, violated expectations.

Fire is dangerous: the rule of fire is to run away from it.  What must have gone through the mind of the first hominid to domesticate fire?  The rule of milk is that it spoils quickly and then you can't drink it - who first turned milk into cheese?  The rule of computers is that they're made with vacuum tubes, fill a room and are so expensive that only corporations can own them.  Wasn't the transistor a surprise...

Who, then, could put laws on creativity?  Who could bound it, who could circumscribe it, even with a concept boundary that distinguishes "creativity" from "not creativity"?  No matter what system you try to lay down, mightn't a more clever person JOOTS right out of it?  If you say "This, this, and this is 'creative'" aren't you just making up the sort of rule that creative minds love to violate?

Why, look at all the rules that smart people have violated throughout history, to the enormous profit of humanity.  Indeed, the most amazing acts of creativity are those that violate the rules that we would least expect to be violated.

Is there not even creativity on the level of how to think?  Wasn't the invention of Science a creative act that violated old beliefs about rationality?  Who, then, can lay down a law of creativity?

But there is one law of creativity which cannot be violated...

Anti-Edgy

In the art world something is "edgy" if it might well shock ordinary folks, but of course not in-the-know folks.  The idea seems to be that ordinary folks are shocked too easily by things that should not really be shocking.

The opposite concept, which I'll call "anti-edgy", is of something that does not shock ordinary folks, but should.  In the know folks are shocked, but most others are not.  Why does the world of art and fashion emphasize the edgy so much more than the anti-edgy? 

Transparent Characters

Most characters in movies, television, and theater are relatively easy for audiences to read.  Actors learn to use their voice tone, gaze direction, body motions, etc. to clearly telegraph their characters' feelings and perspective. But in the stories that are told, the characters themselves usually do not understand each other, or themselves, quite so well.   

For example, audiences enjoy seeing one character lie to another; the audience gets many clues that what is said is a lie, but the duped character just doesn't notice them.  Similarly, characters often have large character flaws easily visible to the audience, such as arrogance or selfishness, but those characters just don't see their own flaws.   

These acting tricks let audiences enjoy a sense of inside access, of being able to see more into the story's world than they can usually see in their ordinary world.  But I fear prolonged exposure to such acting tempts us to overconfidence about how well we can read those around us.  We feel we can read ourselves well and read others better than they can read us.  And when we disagree, we think we can usually spot the flaw in their thinking, a flaw they have not even considered. 

Now I do think humans try to simplify themselves in order to be understood, and thereby trusted, by others.  It is hard to trust folks whose actions you can't at least roughly predict.  But Beware: life is not a movie, and most people can't actually read themselves and others nearly as well as they think they can. 

The Ritual

Followup to:  The Failures of Eld Science, Crisis of Faith

The room in which Jeffreyssai received his non-beisutsukai visitors was quietly formal, impeccably appointed in only the most conservative tastes.  Sunlight and outside air streamed through a grillwork of polished silver, a few sharp edges making it clear that this wall was not to be opened.  The floor and walls were glass, thick enough to distort, to a depth sufficient that it didn't matter what might be underneath.  Upon the surfaces of the glass were subtly scratched patterns of no particular meaning, scribed as if by the hand of an artistically inclined child (and this was in fact the case).

Elsewhere in Jeffreyssai's home there were rooms of other style; but this, he had found, was what most outsiders expected of a Bayesian Master, and he chose not to enlighten them otherwise.  That quiet amusement was one of life's little joys, after all.

The guest sat across from him, knees on the pillow and heels behind.  She was here solely upon the business of her Conspiracy, and her attire showed it:  A form-fitting jumpsuit of pink leather with even her hands gloved - all the way to the hood covering her head and hair, though her face lay plain and unconcealed beneath.

And so Jeffreyssai had chosen to receive her in this room.

Jeffreyssai let out a long breath, exhaling.  "Are you sure?"

"Oh," she said, "and do I have to be absolutely certain before my advice can shift your opinions?  Does it not suffice that I am a domain expert, and you are not?"

The Wire

I recently finished watching the fifth and final season of The Wire, my favorite TV show ever.  It presents a vivid and believable world of Baltimore drugs, police, politics, etc.  Some suggest producer David Simon's "political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness."  But I find The Wire's world unusually consistent with everything I know.  It seems real overall, though Simon tells a less realistic good vs. evil tale about newsrooms, his old stomping ground.

The overall moral of the story seems to me largely libertarian.  A renegade cop effectively legalizing drugs in one area works out great, and the show's writers have a Time oped supporting drug law jury nullification.  Dire consequences follow from child labor and prostitution being illegal.  The police, courts, prisons, schools, and city hall are unrelentingly corrupt and dysfunctional, because voters don't much care.  In the background of the story, industries managed mainly by private enterprise, such as stores, hotels, shipping, and cars, seem to mostly function well.  Private newspapers look bad, but mainly because readers don't much care. 

Apparently, however, many see The Wired as calling for more government.  At a Harvard symposium on The Wired, many panelists said the answer was more funding.  Simon was there: 

The wire is about a world in which people are worth less. ... We depicted a world in which market forces always have their say and in which capitalism has triumphed, and marginalized labor - it makes labor cheap. ... What we have here is a market-based [world]; capitalism has been the God.  To even suggest that there should be some social compact along with the capitalistic forces, to mitigate any of that, over the last twenty-five years, has been political suicide. ... We are only getting the American that we've paid for, no more, and God damn it, we deserve it. 

When asked if government wasn't the problem rather than the solution:

Say It Loud

Reply to:  Overconfidence is Stylish

I respectfully defend my lord Will Strunk:

"If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!"  This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?  Why run and hide?

How does being vague, tame, colorless, irresolute, help someone to understand your current state of uncertainty?  Any more than mumbling helps them understand a word you aren't sure how to pronounce?

Goofus says:  "The sky, if such a thing exists at all, might or might not have a property of color, but, if it does have color, then I feel inclined to state that it might be green."

Gallant says:   "70% probability the sky is green."

Which of them sounds more confident, more definite?

But which of them has managed to quickly communicate their state of uncertainty?

(And which of them is more likely to actually, in real life, spend any time planning and preparing for the eventuality that the sky is blue?)

Overconfidence is Stylish

On William Strunk, author of the classic Elements of Style:

His original Rule 11 was "Make definite assertions." That was Will all over.  He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.

An "irresolute" person is "Undecided or unsure how to act; Indecisive or lacking in resolution."  You couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration that we prefer overconfident people. 

Serious Music

As I too often fall on the wrong side of serious-silly norms, I'd like to better understand what makes music fun vs. serious.   From What Every First-Year College Student Needs to Know About Washington:

Don't dance at indie-rock shows. Maybe where you come from, dancing is acceptable or even fun. Not here. Music is serious, and being serious about music is serious, too. Seriously? Yes. You can smile in an ironic way. Or sneer. But keep those dancing shoes in the closet. You've entered folded-arms territory.

From the Sept. 8 New Yorker:

The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. ... Before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. ... The opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy. The nobles often possessed considerable musical knowledge, but they refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians were doing.  Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed déclassé.  Johnson quotes a nobleman writing, "There is nothing so damnable as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat." ... Public concerts ... [were] eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ...

What changed? .... With the aristocracy declining ... the bourgeoisie increasingly took control of musical life. ... Programs favored composers of the past over those of the present, popular fare was banished, program notes provided orientation to the uninitiated, and the practice of milling about, talking, and applauding during the music subsided.  ... By applauding here and not applauding there, the bourgeois were signalling their membership in a social and cultural élite. As Johnson points out, they felt obliged to reconfirm that status from year to year, since, unlike the aristocrats of yore, they lived in fear of going back down the ladder ... Attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum.

There are important clues in here somewhere, if only I could understand them.

Added 17Sep:  Fortune has a nice quote about serious jazz in the comments.

Fake Fish

1/4 of sushi is mislabeled:

Two high school students ... took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.  They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled.  A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming.  Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt.  Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

This is a huge fraud rate.  Will diners continue to tolerate it?  Probably, yes - I suspect diners care more about affiliating with impressive cooks and fellow diners than they do that fish is correctly labeled.