Tag Archives: Disagreement

The Smart Are MORE Biased To Think They Are LESS Biased

By Robin Hanson · June 7, 2012 10:15 pm · Comments (49)

I seem to know a lot of smart contrarians who think that standard human biases justify their contrarian position. They argue:

Yes, my view on this subject is in contrast to a consensus among academic and other credentialed experts on this subject. But the fact is that human thoughts are subject to many standard biases, and those biases have misled most others to this mistaken consensus position. For example biases A,B, and C would tend to make people think what they do on this subject, even if that view were not true. I, in contrast, have avoided these biases, both because I know about them (see, I can name them), and because I am so much smarter than these other folks. (Have you seen my test scores?) And this is why I can justifiably disagree with an expert consensus on this subject.

Problem is, not only are smart folks not less biased for many biases, if anything smart folks more easily succumb to the bias of thinking that they are less biased than others:

The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. … We found that none of these bias blind spots were attenuated by measures of cognitive sophistication such as cognitive ability or thinking dispositions related to bias. If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases. …

Most cognitive biases in the heuristics and biases literature are negatively correlated with cognitive sophistication, whether the latter is indexed by development, by cognitive ability, or by thinking dispositions. This was not true for any of the bias blind spots studied here. As opposed to the social emphasis in past work on the bias blind spot, we examined bias blind spots connected to some of the most well-known effects from the heuristics and biases literature: outcome bias, base-rate neglect, framing bias, conjunction fallacy, anchoring bias, and myside bias. We found that none of these bias blind spot effects displayed a negative correlation with measures of cognitive ability (SAT total, CRT) or with measures of thinking dispositions (need for cognition, actively open-minded thinking). If anything, the correlations went in the other direction.

We explored the obvious explanation for the indications of a positive correlation between cognitive ability and the magnitude of the bias blind spot in our data. That explanation is the not unreasonable one that more cognitively sophisticated people might indeed show lower cognitive biases—so that it would be correct for them to view themselves as less biased than their peers. However, … we found very little evidence that these classic biases were attenuated by cognitive ability. More intelligent people were not actually less biased—a finding that would have justified their displaying a larger bias blind spot. …

Thus, the bias blind spot joins a small group of other effects such as myside bias and noncausal base-rate neglect in being unmitigated by increases in intelligence. That cognitive sophistication does not mitigate the bias blind spot is consistent with the idea that the mechanisms that cause the bias are quite fundamental and not easily controlled strategically— that they reflect what is termed Type 1 processing in dual-process theory. (more)

Added 12June: The New Yorker talks about this paper:

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” … All four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.”

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Experts Agree

By Robin Hanson · May 25, 2012 2:35 pm · Comments (10)

Mental health diagnoses are evaluated in part by the consistency with which professionals assign diagnoses. Turns out, there is often a low correlation between the diagnoses different folks assign to a patient:

The DSM-5 revision has been intensely controversial, with critics … charging that poorly drafted changes would lead to millions more people being given unnecessary and risky drugs. The field trials used a statistic called kappa. This measures the consensus between different doctors assessing the same patient, with 1 corresponding to perfect diagnostic agreement, and 0 meaning concordance could just be due to chance. In January, leaders of the DSM-5 revision announced that kappas as low as 0.2 should be considered “acceptable”.

“Most researchers agree that 0.2 to 0.4 is really not in the acceptable range,” says Dayle Jones of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who is tracking DSM-5 for the American Counseling Association.

One proposed diagnosis failed to reach even this standard. Some patients turning up in doctors’ offices are both depressed and anxious, so mixed anxiety/depression was tested as a new category: the kappa for adults was less than 0.01.

Attenuated psychosis syndrome, meanwhile, was intended to catch young people in the early stages of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. While field trials gave a kappa of 0.46, the variability was so large that Darrel Regier, APA’s head of research, told the meeting that the result was “uninterpretable”. Both disorders are now headed for DSM-5′s appendix …

The low kappas recorded for major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder – 0.32 and 0.2 respectively in the adult trials – raise serious questions. (more)

Similarly low levels of agreement are found in academic peer review – referees judging papers submitted to journals, for example, rarely agree on whether the paper should be accepted. Yet, not only are academics and mental health professionals still considered experts, expert agreement remains one of the main ways the public uses to judge who is an expert.

In the public eye, experts on X are people who tend to agree when outsiders ask them questions about X, such as the meaning of special words or phrases about X, or who is an expert on X.  After all, this is pretty much the only concrete data they have to go on. It helps if these experts also do some things that outsiders see as impressive, but this usually isn’t necessary to be considered an expert.

I have two observations:

  1. On the one hand, this is a depressingly low standard. For example, even if religious priests can agree on what statements are religious heresy, we wouldn’t necessarily want to empower them to torture such heretics. So the fact that psychiatrists can agree on how to diagnose certain types of mental illness doesn’t by itself mean we should empower them to detain such patients against their will. Yet in practice mere agreement among experts is the main criteria the public uses to decide which experts to empower.
  2. On the other hand, given how important expert agreement is to expert reputation, it might seem surprising that experts don’t try harder to find simple ways to agree with each. For example, mental health experts could coordinate on hair color, weight, or vocabulary as simple ways to make sure they assign the same labels to the same patients. Yes, they’d have to do this on the sly, and overtly pretend to be using other criteria. But how hard could that be for homo hypocritus to do? Apparently, the fact that they agree enough on who is an expert gives them some slack to disagree about some other things. Their pride and beliefs about the basis of their expertise prevent them from coordinating too consciously on simple ways to agree, such as diagnosing mental illness based on hair color, etc.
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We Have Comment Likes

By Robin Hanson · May 23, 2012 8:25 am · Comments (34)

Blog comments vary greatly in quality, and often low quality comments drive away readers and high quality comments. This blog is no exception.

We now have a “like” button in our comments section. If the people willing to like a comment have on average better taste than the people willing to write a comment, readers and authors could avoid low quality comments by focusing on the most liked comments. It isn’t obvious why this assumption should hold, but I thought likes probably couldn’t make comments much worse, so, why not give it a try.

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Taming The Wild Idea

By Robin Hanson · May 10, 2012 1:50 pm · Comments (17)

Foragers distinguish between camp and the wild. In camp, things are safe and comfortable, and people should be pleasant. The wild, in contrast, is dangerous and uncontrolled. In camp, some of us must watch out for intrusions from wild, such as storms, wild animals, or hostile tribes.

Some of us must also periodically venture into the wild, to bring back food and other useful materials. But it is important that whatever we bring back be tamed before it gets here. Don’t bring back live dangerous animals, don’t leave poison berries around camp where people might think they are safe, and leave violent aggressive hunt habits out there in the wild. What happens in the wild, should stay in the wild.

Ideas and concepts can be dangerous and disruptive. Ideas influence the status and attractiveness of people and activities, and who is blamed and credited for what outcomes. For a society vulnerable to social disruption, ideas can be wild.

Today, most of the ideas and concepts that we come across have been tamed. They have long been integrated into our ways of thinking, and we have worked out attitudes and opinions to help us avoid being cut by their sharp edges.

But today we must also deal with a steady stream of new untamed ideas. Some of these are the side effect of ordinary people doing ordinary things. Others come from intellectual explorers, who purposely venture into the wild in search of new ideas. How do we tame such ideas?

We celebrate our intellectual explorers, both those who come back with useful ideas, and those whose useless ideas show off their impressive explorer abilities. But we are also wary of their trophies, just as foragers would be way of a hunter bringing a strange live animal into camp. We want people we trust and respect to tame those ideas before let them flow free in our camp of easily discussed ideas. Wild explorers, who may have “gone native”, can be useful in expeditions, but must remain under the control of more civilized explorers.

I think this helps us understand why universities, some of the most conservative institutions we have, are home to our most celebrated intellectuals. Academic institutions such as universities, academic journals, peer review, etc. seem far from ideal ways to encourage innovative ideas. But they seem like better ways to ensure outsiders that ideas have been safely tamed. The new ideas that academics endorse can be safely quoted and an applied with minimal risk of wild uncontrolled disruption. So when ideas originate among wild untamed academic-outsiders, we prefer to attribute them to the safe academic insiders who tame them.

When we are willing to risk being exposed to wild untamed ideas, we turn less to academics, and more to startup companies, passionate writers, activists, etc. And in our youth, many of us are eager for such exposure, to show that we are no longer children who must stay safely in camp – we are strong and brave enough to venture into the wild.

But when we get children of our own, and feel less a need to show off our derring-do, we prefer tamed idea sources. We prefer to hire kids who got their ideas from universities, not startups or activists. And most prefer their news to come from similarly tamed journalists. We applaud wild ideas, but prefer them tamed.

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Far Truth Is For Extremes

By Robin Hanson · May 5, 2012 3:30 pm · Comments (18)

To answer the question posed in my last post, here are some situations where it makes sense to forgo the large benefits of things like religion, to care about far truth:

  1. You are stuck in your ways, like a smoking addict. You admit it would have been better for you had you become more religious early on, but alas you fell in with the wrong crowd, and now the costs of change for you outweigh religion’s gains. If you are nice, you’ll warn young folks to avoid your downfall.
  2. Contrarian far claims with big personal consequences are true. If choosing cryonics would gain you five or more expected years of life (over its costs), and you are one of the rare people who would actually do something so contrarian after being intellectually convinced of its advantages, and if you can reliably discern when a majority is wrong, then you’ll need to think accurately about far topics to find such opportunities. For non-contrarian far claims with personal consequences, you could just follow the crowd without thinking.
  3. You have a good chance of being respected as a far topic expert, by a community that evaluates claims in truth-correlated ways. If you could be a famous cosmologist, you might try to create cosmology claims that will look good when evaluated by the tests cosmologists will apply. The gains from becoming a famous cosmologist could outweigh the risk that by becoming more truth oriented you will forgo religion’s gains. Beware, however, that truth-correlated is not the same as true – most communities say their far claim tests are more truth-correlated than they actually are.

So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you. Go away, and sin no more.

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Analysis Is Far Skeptical

By Robin Hanson · April 27, 2012 12:45 pm · Comments (11)

People famously tend to disagree more about politics, religion, and romance, Which makes sense – I’ve argued that disagreement is due to by a near-far bias, and that politics, religion, and love are far topics. It should be especially clear that religion is a far topic, dealing with fundamental values and big grand things like Gods over vast space and time scales.

Since creative metaphor is far, and analysis is near, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that inducing an analytical frame of mind tends to induce “religious disbelief”, i.e., disbelief in gods, devils, and angels:

Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. (more)

You could point to this as evidence against religious beliefs, but the same analysis primes probably also induce more skepticism on common political and romantic beliefs. They might even induce more skepticism on the mulitverse, string theory, or the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, all of which have big grand aspects.

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Ban Election Arguments?

By Robin Hanson · April 8, 2012 1:45 pm · Comments (28)

While Intrade has betting markets on the US presidential election, they are unregulated and of questionable US legality. Nadex went through the expensive legal hoops to apply for permission to run a regulated market. Last week:

The CFTC determined that the contracts involve gaming and are contrary to the public interest. (more)

Why?

It could unduly influence election results. … the contracts could run afoul of the election process if traders had financial incentives to vote for particular candidates. (more)

They still allow election betting at the Iowa Electronic Markets, where stakes are limited to $500. They still let people work for campaigns and administrations, which gives them financial incentives to vote for certain candidates. And they let candidates take positions favoring some industries, occupations, and locations, over others, which gives people financial incentives to vote for and against candidates.

We also let people tell other people which candidates they favor, which gives people non-financial incentives to vote for those candidates later. And since every bet for a candidate is matched with a bet against that candidate, whenever a betting market gives anyone a financial incentive to vote for a candidate, it at the same time gives someone else a financial incentive to vote against that candidate. Why are all the rest of these “due” influences, while bets are “undue” influences?

Paula Dwyer argues:

Naked credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt (buying a CDS without owning the underlying debt) are no more than a bet on a Greek default. Will the CFTC be barring them, too? (more)

Law and Economics professors Eric Posner and Glen Weyl support the CFTC:

Financial instruments that serve primarily as a means of speculation rather than hedging should be banned … Suppose that two individuals, neither of whom uses or produces oil, harbor different opinions about the future price of oil and decide to wager on it. Both parties willingly participate, because they think they’re each getting the best of their confused counterparty. Clearly, both of them cannot gain from this transaction, and the wager itself creates rather than reduces risk. While each party thinks it is getting the better of the other, both agree that on average both of them will be worse off because on average they will win and lose on the same number of bets, and both of their incomes will be less smooth and predictable on account of their wagering. As a consequence, this sort of speculation is socially harmful. …

In controlled and appropriate contexts, [gambling] can be a source of entertainment for people who are aware of and willing to accept the potential losses. But participants in financial markets are usually seeking financial security rather than entertainment, and they typically have little sense of the risks they are taking on. … A second potential benefit of allowing trading in derivatives is the information that they provide to market participants. The knowledge of the likely outcome of the presidential election provided by the wisdom of the crowds is useful for planning by businesses, individuals, and governments. But that information is only valuable to the extent that it enables real economic decisions to be made more effectively.

Consider: why should we let people argue on elections? Similar to the above, one could say:

People mainly argue in the hope of winning arguments, thinking that they are taking advantage of confused opponents. While each side hopes that further events and discussions will reveal them to have been more in the right, both sides understand that this can’t happen for both of them. Yes, people might argue just to have fun, but election pundits seem serious – wanting more to prove the other side wrong. And most people who argue politics seem to have little understanding of what they are talking about. Yes, arguments can produce useful info for others, but the value of the info produced in election arguments is small compared to the time lost arguing. Thus we should ban arguments on elections.

Election arguers and bettors both seem motivated by a similar mix of enjoying the process and hoping to win. But the info produced by bettors is far more persuasive, reliable, and useful – you have far better reasons to believe betting market odds than whatever the apparent winner of a political argument has claimed.

You might counter that people sometimes argue about who should win an election, rather than who will win. But betting markets can collect info on that topic as well – we can bet on outcomes after the election conditional on who wins the election. These sort of markets would be enormously helpful to tell voters about which candidate will best promote health, peace, or prosperity. Yet such markets are now banned because they might “unduly” influence elections, or let people “waste” their time “arguing” about elections. Heaven forbid we should waste time figuring out which candidate would actually help us more.

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Disagreement Experiment

By Robin Hanson · March 15, 2012 9:00 am · Comments (14)

A lab experiment induces common priors, tells each person of the actions of others, and yet still finds disagreement, in conflict with predictions from common knowledge of rationality:

We look at choices in round 1, when individuals should still maintain common priors, being indifferent about the true state. Nonetheless, we see that about 20% of the sample erroneously disagrees and favors one point of view. Moreover, while other errors tend to diminish as the experiment progresses, the fraction making this type of error is nearly constant. One may interpret disagreement in this case as evidence of erroneous or nonrational choices.

Next, we look at the final round where information about disagreement is made public and, under common knowledge of rationality, should be sufficient to eliminate disagreement. Here we find that individuals weigh their own information more than twice that of the five others in their group. When we look separately at those who err by disagreeing in round 1, we find that these people weigh their own information more than 10 times that of others, putting virtually no stock in public information. This indicates a different type of error, that is, a failure of some individuals to learn from each other. This error is quite large and for a nontrivial minority of the population.

Setting aside the subjects who make systematic errors, we find that individuals still put 50% more weight on their own information than they do on the information revealed through the actions of others, although this difference is not statistically significant. (more)

So in this experiment there is a bottom quintile of idiots, and everyone else seems roughly accurate in discounting the opinions of a pool of others containing such idiots. So in this experiment it seems the main reason people think they are better than others is that everyone, even idiots, don’t think they are idiots. I wonder how behavior would change if everyone was shown clearly that the idiots were no longer participating.

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How To Influence People

By Robin Hanson · March 13, 2012 12:00 pm · Comments (25)

I posted before on the how-to-win-friends part of Dale Carnegie’s classic How To Win Friends And Influence People. Today I’ll discuss influencing. Carnegie offers twelve principles, the first three of which are:

  1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
  2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
  3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

He illustrates principle 1 with a story:

During the dinner, … the [storyteller] mentioned that the quotation was from the Bible. He was wrong. I knew that, I knew it positively. … I appointed myself as an unsolicited and unwelcome committee of one to correct him. He stuck to his guns. … Frank Gammond, an old friend of mine, … had devoted years to the study of Shakespeare, So the storyteller and I agreed to submit the question to Mr. Gammond. Mr. Gammond listened, kicked me under the table, and then said: “Dale, you are wrong. The gentleman is right. It is from the Bible.” On our way home that night, I said to Mr. Gammond: “Frank, you knew that quotation was from Shakespeare,” “Yes, of course. … But we were guests at a festive occasion, my dear Dale. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn’t ask for your opinion. He didn’t want it. Why argue with him?” … I not only had made the storyteller uncomfortable, but had put my friend in an embarrassing situation. How much better it would have been had I not become argumentative.

Carnegie also tells of how Ben Franklin learned a similar lesson:

“I made it a rule,” said Franklin, “to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiment of others, and all positive assertion of my own.”

This is a hard lesson for me. Humans have many conversation ideals, and usually act as if they uphold such ideals. For example, you aren’t supposed to lie. And if you talk about something as if you think it important, and someone else knows a good clear reason that something important about what you said is wrong, they are supposed to tell you, and you are supposed to listen, and then change your mind. So we commonly talk as if we assume people who said something must believe it, as if people who heard a claim and didn’t object must not have known a good clear reason it was wrong, and as if people who don’t publicly change their minds when others object must not think the reason offered was good and clear.

But we are actually hypocritical about such ideals – we try to avoid visibly violating them, yet are not otherwise eager to follow them against our interests. We often object to unimportant claims by rivals, to gain status at their expense. We often pretend we don’t think reasons offered by others are good, to avoid visibly changing our mind. We often lie. And those of us who are best at arguing and lying are the most eager to uphold conversation ideals, as we can best evade detection of our ideal violations.

So how committed should we be to such ideals? How should we think of Carnegie and Franklin’s violations, refusing to tell others they are wrong, and even lying on occasion to avoid conflict? Given that they will try to admit when they are wrong, I find it hard to find much fault overall in them. Yes, their refusing to disagree on something important could fail to inform others, but I doubt they took this habit to such extremes. I expect that in such situations they disagreed indirectly, but still got their key info across.

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Turbulence Contrarians

By Robin Hanson · February 28, 2012 8:40 am · Comments (6)

A few months ago I came across an intriguing contrarian theory:

Hydrogravitional-dynamics (HGD) cosmology … predicts … Earth-mass planets fragmented from plasma at 300 Kyr [after the big bang]. Stars promptly formed from mergers of these gas planets, and chemicals C, N, O, Fe etc. were created by the stars and their supernovae. Seeded gas planets reduced the oxides to hot water oceans [at 2 Myr], … [which] hosted the first organic chemistry and the first life, distributed to the 1080 planets of the cosmological big bang by comets. … The dark matter of galaxies is mostly primordial planets in proto globular star cluster clumps, 30,000,000 planets per star (not 8!). (more)

Digging further, I found that these contrarians have related views on the puzzlingly high levels of mixing found in oceans, atmospheres, and stars. For example, some invoke fish swimming to explain otherwise puzzling high levels of ocean water mixing. These turbulence contrarians say that most theorists neglect an important long tail of rare bursts of intense turbulence, each followed by long-lasting “contrails.” These rare bursts not only mix oceans and atmospheres, they also supposedly create a more rapid clumping of matter in the early universe, leading to more earlier nomad planets (not tied to stars), which could then lead to early life and its rapid spread.

I didn’t understand turbulence well enough to judge these theories, so I set it all aside. But over the last few months I’ve noticed many reports about puzzling numbers and locations of planets:

What has puzzled observers and theorists so far is the high proportion of planets — roughly one-third to one-half — that are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. … Furthermore, most of them are in tight orbits around their host star, precisely where the modellers say they shouldn’t be. (more)

Last year, researchers detected about a dozen nomad planets, using a technique called gravitational microlensing, which looks for stars whose light is momentarily refocused by the gravity of passing planets. The research produced evidence that roughly two nomads exist for every typical, so-called main-sequence star in our galaxy. The new study estimates that nomads may be up to 50,000 times more common than that. (more)

This new study was theoretical. It used a best fit power law fit to the distribution of nomad planet microlensing observations to predict ~60 Pluto sized or larger nomad planets per star.  When projected down to the comet scale, this power law actually matches known bounds on comet density. The 95% c.l. upper bound for the power law parameter gives 100,000 such wandering Plutos or larger per star.

I take all this as weak support for something in the direction of these contrarian theories – there are more nomad planets than theorists expected, and some of that may come from neglect of early universe turbulence. But thirty million nomad Plutos per star still seems pretty damn unlikely.

FYI, here is part of an email I sent the authors in mid December, as yet unanswered: Continue reading "Turbulence Contrarians" »

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