Overcoming Bias

Loving Loyalty

It's not what you know but who you know.

Cynics say that when choosing associates we pretend to care about many things, but we mainly care about loyalty.  Support comes from our apparently caring more for famously-loyal dogs than for lovable-but-aloof cats:

You'd think from the numbers that cats are "man's best friend." ... [U.S.] cats outnumber dogs by more than 10 million (82 million to 72 million). And, no question, kitties have legions of fans.  But here's the dirty little secret: Cats are more often neglected than dogs, more often relinquished to shelters than dogs and less often taken to veterinarians than dogs. ...

"I hate cats" mail outnumbers the dog hate mail about 50 to 1. ... Increasingly more cats are given up at shelters than their canine cousins. ... An estimated 30% of those dogs who land in shelters eventually are reclaimed. Of the lost cats who find themselves in a shelter, a meager 2% to 5% are ever identified by their owners. ...

Vet visits for pet cats have fallen 11% since 2001 ... with more than a third of all cats never visiting a veterinarian in 2006 (compared with 17% of dogs who didn't see a vet). ... Morris Animal Foundation, a nonprofit funder of pet and wildlife health studies, is spending nearly three times as much on canine health initiatives as on cat health research.

The Genetic Fallacy

In lists of logical fallacies, you will find included "the genetic fallacy" - the fallacy attacking a belief, based on someone's causes for believing it.

This is, at first sight, a very strange idea - if the causes of a belief do not determine its systematic reliability, what does?  If Deep Blue advises us of a chess move, we trust it based on our understanding of the code that searches the game tree, being unable to evaluate the actual game tree ourselves.  What could license any probability assignment as "rational", except that it was produced by some systematically reliable process?

Articles on the genetic fallacy will tell you that genetic reasoning is not always a fallacy - that the origin of evidence can be relevant to its evaluation, as in the case of a trusted expert.  But other times, say the articles, it is a fallacy; the chemist Kekulé first saw the ring structure of benzene in a dream, but this doesn't mean we can never trust this belief.

So sometimes the genetic fallacy is a fallacy, and sometimes it's not?

The genetic fallacy is formally a fallacy, because the original cause of a belief is not the same as its current justificational status, the sum of all the support and antisupport currently known.

Yet we change our minds less often than we think.  Genetic accusations have a force among humans that they would not have among ideal Bayesians.

Overcoming Our Vs. Others' Biases

Many groups over the last century or so have defined themselves in terms of trying to overcome other people's biases, while our group here is defined more in terms of trying to overcome our own biases.  What is the relation between these two types of activities?

Over the last century many groups have self-identified as repressed "minorities" and sought to organize themselves to act to shame and threaten so others will "repress" them less in various ways.  More recently many (but hardly all) of these groups have formed a coalition to together support all their demands, under the banner of supporting "diversity."  The argument seems to be that we all tend to be biased to treat poorly those who deviate from a certain ideal, e.g., rich middle-aged middle-height white male right-handed hearing Christian heterosexuals.   

We gather here instead to try to overcome our own biases, whatever those may be.  So we must confront our relation to this history.  If we accepted this coalition's main claim, we would try to overcome our own bias favoring this standard ideal.  And we would have to judge how much of this bias remains in our culture, after the many successes of this coalition in remaking our culture.  If we accept a more general claim that we tend to be biased against all minorities of any sort, we would try to overcome our own bias against minority features or activities.  (Is there a better way to phrase a general claim here?)

Of course we must also consider the hypothesis that we are not biased against minorities in general, or this coalition in particular, either because we never were so biased or because we have already overcome such biases.  In this case we might view the continued lobbying of self-identified repressed minorities as just a selfish grab for more attention and deference than they deserve [added: or more charitably, just an honest mistake on their part.]

What say ye all?  And what evidence can help us decide?

The Moral Void

Followup to:  What Would You Do Without Morality?, Something to Protect

Once, discussing "horrible job interview questions" to ask candidates for a Friendly AI project, I suggested the following:

Would you kill babies if it was inherently the right thing to do?  Yes [] No []

If "no", under what circumstances would you not do the right thing to do?   ___________

If "yes", how inherently right would it have to be, for how many babies?     ___________

The Outside View's Domain

Followup to:  The Planning Fallacy

Plato's Phaedo:

    "The state of sleep is opposed to the state of waking; and out of sleeping, waking is generated; and out of waking, sleeping; and the process of generation is in the one case falling asleep, and in the other waking up.  Do you agree?"
    "Quite."
    "Then suppose that you analyze life and death to me in the same manner.  Is not death opposed to life?"
    "Yes."
    "And they are generated one from the other?"
    "Yes."
    "What is generated from life?"
    "Death."
    "And what from death?"
    "I can only say in answer - life."
    "Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated from the dead?"
    "That is clear."
    "Then our souls exist in the house of Hades."
    "It seems so."

Now suppose that the foil in the dialogue had objected a bit more strongly, and also that Plato himself had known about the standard research on the Inside View vs. Outside View...

(As I disapprove of Plato's use of Socrates as his character mouthpiece, I shall let one of the characters be Plato; and the other... let's call him "Phaecrinon".)

Gratitude Decay

I've said before that relationships suffer from the bias that "We tend to remember slights and frustrations more than favors and kindnesses."  More now from Marginal Revolution:

Immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer.  However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient's eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases.

Remember that when you accuse someone of looking at their partner(s) with excessively rose-colored glasses. 

In Bias, Meta is Max

A recent Science review notes our worst bias is meta - being more aware of biases makes us more willing to assume that others' biases, and not ours, are responsible for our disagreement:

Because people often do not recognize when personal biases and idiosyncratic interpretations have shaped their judgments and preferences, they often take for granted that others will share those judgments and preferences. When others do not, people's faith in their own objectivity often prompts them to view those others as biased. Indeed, people show a broad and pervasive tendency to see (and even exaggerate) the impact of bias on others' judgments while denying its influence on their own.

For example, people think that others' policy opinions are biased by self-interest, that others' social judgments are biased by an inclination to rely on dispositional (rather than situational) explanations for behavior, and that others' perceptions of interpersonal conflicts are biased by their personal allegiances. At the same time, people are blind to each of these biases in their own judgments.

Beware Identity

More from Paul Graham's fantastic essay on lying to kids:

Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. ...

Almost anything else you tell a kid, they can change their mind about later when they start to think for themselves. But if you tell a kid they're a member of a certain group, that seems nearly impossible to shake. ... When parents are of different religions, they'll often agree between themselves that their children will be "raised as Xes." And it works. The kids obligingly grow up considering themselves as Xes ...

If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren't an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? ...

This form of lie is not without its uses. ... You can tell the child that in addition to never wearing the color yellow, believing the world was created by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious.  Then X children will grow up feeling it's part of their identity to be honest and industrious.

I try to be wary of beliefs attributed to me via some part of my being a nerdy middle-age white male American economist homeowner parent.  I do not want any such feature to on net influence my beliefs (other than through influencing my truth-seeking).  Do read the whole Graham essay, by the way - it is gold. 

Scarcity

What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.  I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends.

Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

• If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one.  If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other.  (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)
   
• When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents.  Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily.  (Mazis 1975, Mazis et. al. 1973.)
  

Uninformative Experience

Michael Webster summarizes a key point from the book "Mistakes were made, but not by me":

"The more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, and inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made."

If you are looking to purchase a franchise, then don't look to the existing franchisees for information - if they are doing poorly, their brains will engage in self-deception trying to convince you of how good their choice was.  You should get in touch with other individual making the same pre-purchase decision - individuals who have not been to discovery day or who have been in contact with the franchisor.

Perhaps this is why the young don't listen much to the old.