Overcoming Bias

Thinking Helps

Published in 2005: 

Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple choice tests.  Virtually all research on this topic, however, has suggested that this strategy is ill-founded: Most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores.  Why? .... Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one's original answer leads to more "if only ..." self-recriminations ...[making such events] more memorable.   

All Are Skill Unaware

The blogsphere adores Kruger and Dunning's '99 paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It".  Google blog search lists ten blog mentions just in the last month.  For example:

Perhaps the single academic study most germane to the present election ... In short, smart people tend to believe that everyone else "gets it." Incompetent people display both an increasing tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities and a belief that they are smarter than the majority of those demonstrably sharper. 

This paper describes everyone's favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots; no point in listening to or reasoning with such fools.  However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning's main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty.  For example, Burson, Larrick, and Klayman's '06 paper "Skilled or Unskilled, but Still Unaware of It":

Positive vs. Optimal

I've been thinking a little lately about the difference between doing something useful, and doing the most useful thing. The latter is a lot harder, yet a lot more productive. I wonder if this is a basic area of human irrationality. I think you can classify a lot of the bad arguments that get made for things like the bailout of banks, or of car companies, as people saying "Here is why this money would help these companies", and missing out on "But it would help the rest of the world (like, companies that are profitable) even more".

Normally I rail against zero-sum thinking, the belief that we're just dividing up a fixed pie. But in the short-term, the inputs to producing happiness are constrained. I only have 24 hours in the day. The GDP of the US is only so much. We're investing those resources to produce even more resources - but the inputs at this stage are fixed. We can't invest in every positive-sum project. When you are figuring out what to do with these constrained inputs, you need to balance your use against *every other possible use* (or more specifically, the best alternative use). (This is nerve-wracking and tortuous, but you don't actually have to do it that well - if you just do a decent job, you'll be doing way better than someone who just does whatever positive projects happen to catch their attention.)

I think this connects to important topics at the micro and the macro level. Personal productivity techniques like Eat That Frog or Big Rocks are based on fighting our inclination to do what seems urgent, and instead doing what is optimal. I know I have a lot of trouble getting distracted by small urgent things, rather than doing the core, important work, and it seems to be a general problem. Our intuition is a terrible task prioritizer. And much of the erroneous analysis about the benefits of regulation has to do with ignoring the invisible (the best alternative use of the resources), as Henry Hazlitt so eloquently writes. Our intuition seizes on the visible consequences, and has trouble seeing the subtle, distributed, unrealized, un-proposed alternatives.

Which suggests a technique for overcoming this, at both the personal and professional levels. Try to always present alternatives. Reify the other options - or your mind will focus on whether your proposal does net good, rather than the most good with its limited resources.

Conformity Shows Loyalty

"The world has too many people showing too much loyalty to their groups.  That is why I'm so proud to be member of ALU, anti-loyalists united, where we refuse to show loyalty to any other groups. My local chapter just kicked out George for suspicion of showing loyalty to California, and we chastised Ellen for expressing doubts about the latest anti-loyalty directives from headquarters.  We'll only lick loyalty by showing we are united behind our courageous ALU leaders.  All hail ALU!"

Sounds pretty silly, right?  But I hear something pretty similar when I hear folks say they are proud to be part of a group that fights conformity by pushing their unusual beliefs.  Especially when such folks seem more comfortable claiming their beliefs contribute to diversity than that they are true.   

We use belief conformity to show loyalty to particular groups, relative to other groups.  We rarely bother to show loyalty to humanity as a whole, because non-humans threaten little.  So we rarely bother to try to conform our beliefs with humanity as a whole, which is why herding experiments with random subjects show no general conformity tendencies. 

Our conformity efforts instead target smaller in-groups, with more threatening out-groups.  And we are most willing to conform our beliefs on abstract ideological topics, like politics or religion, where our opinions have few other personal consequences.  Our choices show to which conflicting groups we feel the most allied.   

You just can't fight "conformity" by indulging the evil pleasure of enjoying your conformity to a small tight-knit group of "non-conformists."  All this does is promote some groups at the expense of other groups, and poisons your mind in the process.  It is like fighting "loyalty" by dogged devotion to an anti-loyalty alliance.

Best to clear your mind and emotions of group loyalties and resentments and ask, if this belief gave me no pleasure of rebelling against some folks or identifying with others, if it was just me alone choosing, would my best evidence suggest that this belief is true?  All else is the road to rationality ruin. 

What Belief Conformity?

I wrote:

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. ... This feeling is EVIL.

Patri Friedman responded:

I see this bias as counteracting the bias of groupthink. The opposite bias is for people to enjoy believing what everyone else believes. This leads to homogeneity of viewpoints, less generation and testing of new hypothesis, and stasis. The people who enjoy believing they have a secret truth are those who nurture non-mainstream but plausible hypotheses, and accumulate new evidence to possibly challenge the mainstream. I think this is very valuable.

Yes, we want to explore a diversity of hypotheses, but this doesn't require a diversity of beliefs; we can believe similar things while exploring different things.  Yes, groupthink seems to exist, but not as a general bias to conform to average beliefs; groupthink is a bias to conform to in-group beliefs against out-groups.  Thus by their nature groupthink biases of in-groups come already countered by out-groups. 

When a particular group (such as academia) rewards in-group conformity, you may at times be right to resist that.  But by doing so you would not be resisting some general pressure to conform with a global average; you would instead be favoring one group less than others.  I see no general conformity pressure in need of resisting; I instead see instead particular groupthinks, some of which may be preferred to others. 

For example, in herding experiments, subjects must choose between a few acts (e.g., which movie to watch), where some acts pay better than others.  One at a time subjects choose an act, after seeing both a private clue about act quality, and seeing others' previous choices.  I've just reviewed 16 papers on this (including this this this this this this this this this this this and this).

Depressed Not More Accurate

People seem to love the idea that depressed folk are more realistic.  Not so, says an '06 paper I'll mention again later this week:

A debate in the depressive realism literature ended in the conclusion that neither depressed nor nondepressed subjects displayed differential accuracy in terms of being able to vary their judgments to achieve accuracy across changing situations (Dykman et al., 1989, p. 442). Instead, who appeared more accurate was an accident of the match between a dispositional bias (chronic perceptions of low or high control) and the degree of control actually available in a given task.

Points of Departure

Followup to:  Anthropomorphic Optimism

If you've watched Hollywood sci-fi involving supposed robots, androids, or AIs, then you've seen AIs that are depicted as "emotionless".  In the olden days this was done by having the AI speak in a monotone pitch - while perfectly stressing the syllables, of course.  (I could similarly go on about how AIs that disastrously misinterpret their mission instructions, never seem to need help parsing spoken English.)  You can also show that an AI is "emotionless" by having it notice an emotion with a blatant somatic effect, like tears or laughter, and ask what it means (though of course the AI never asks about sweat or coughing).

If you watch enough Hollywood sci-fi, you'll run into all of the following situations occurring with supposedly "emotionless" AIs:

1. An AI that malfunctions or otherwise turns evil, instantly acquires all of the negative human emotions - it hates, it wants revenge, and feels the need to make self-justifying speeches.
2. Conversely, an AI that turns to the Light Side, gradually acquires a full complement of human emotions.
3. An "emotionless" AI suddenly exhibits human emotion when under exceptional stress; e.g. an AI that displays no reaction to thousands of deaths, suddenly showing remorse upon killing its creator.
4. An AI begins to exhibit signs of human emotion, and refuses to admit it.

Now, why might a Hollywood scriptwriter make those particular mistakes?

Mirrored Lives

People exhibit less prejudice when they're in the presence of a mirror, Dutch researchers have shown. ... Mirrors make us more aware of our public appearance, and therefore remind us of the need to fall in line with social norms.

More here.  I suspect social networking also makes our lives more "mirrored" - we are more aware of how we appear to others and that others are watching us.  Welcome to the transparent society.  HT to Tyler.

Risk is Physical

Economic "risk" means something different than ordinary risk.  When a big strong creature swaggers around, ready to take on all comers, while a small meek creature cowers in a corner, avoiding attention or conflict, we might call the swaggering one risk-loving, and the cowering one risk-averse.  Economists are careful to note, however, that they mean "risk" to connote a tolerance for variance - and it could be that by swaggering the big one reduces his outcome variance.  It seems, however, that these different risk concepts are more related than we realized: 

In general, women are found to be more risk averse, and risk aversion is seen to decline with age and wealth. ...  In addition, choices for others were related to the choices individuals made for themselves. ... Both evolutionary and economic theories suggest that physically stronger decision makers should make riskier decisions, suggesting physical prowess as an underlying cause of gender differences. ...

This study uses four different measures of physical prowess. First, we directly measure hand strength using a dynamometer. Second, we collect information related to organism quality, based on biologically based observations: height, weight, perceived strength, and attractiveness. Third, we collect survey-based measures of self-perceptions of athleticism and strength, and self-reported behavior such as participation in sports. Finally, we collect personality-based measures of strength. We find that perceptions about a person's strength and organism quality are strongly related to predicted [risk] choices, and objective measures and self-perceptions of prowess are related to actual gamble choices. Advisors exhibit significant prediction biases when attempting to forecast individual gamble choices, and the biases take the form of exaggerations of the effect of observable characteristics.

So if we could get people to exercise more, would they become more risk-loving, want less insurance, make more aggressive investments, and induce faster economic growth?  Would this be a good thing?

Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness

Followup to:  Magical Categories

What on Earth could someone possibly be thinking, when they propose creating a superintelligence whose behaviors are reinforced by human smiles? Tiny molecular photographs of human smiles - or if you rule that out, then faces ripped off and permanently wired into smiles - or if you rule that out, then brains stimulated into permanent maximum happiness, in whichever way results in the widest smiles...

Well, you never do know what other people are thinking, but in this case I'm willing to make a guess.  It has to do with a field of cognitive psychology called Qualitative Reasoning.

Qualitative reasoning is what you use to decide that increasing the temperature of your burner increases the rate at which your water boils, which decreases the derivative of the amount of water present. One would also add the sign of d(water) - negative, meaning that the amount of water is decreasing - and perhaps the fact that there is only a bounded amount of water.  Or we could say that turning up the burner increases the rate at which the water temperature increases, until the water temperature goes over a fixed threshold, at which point the water starts boiling, and hence decreasing in quantity... etc.

That's qualitative reasoning, a small subfield of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence - reasoning that doesn't describe or predict exact quantities, but rather the signs of quantities, their derivatives, the existence of thresholds.

As usual, human common sense means we can see things by qualitative reasoning that current programs can't - but the more interesting realization is how vital human qualitative reasoning is to our vaunted human common sense.  It's one of the basic ways in which we comprehend the world.

Without timers you can't figure out how long water takes to boil, your mind isn't that precise.  But you can figure out that you should turn the burner up, rather than down, and then watch to make sure the water doesn't all boil away.  Which is what you mainly need, in the real world.  Or at least we humans seem to get by on qualitative reasoning; we may not realize what we're missing...

So I suspect that what went through the one's mind, proposing the AI whose behaviors would be reinforced by human smiles, was something like this: