It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. The Red Queen. In my last post I said that as “you must allocate a very limited budget of rationality”, we “must choose where to focus our efforts to attend carefully to avoiding possible biases.” Some objected, seeing the task of overcoming bias as like lifting weights to build muscles. Scott Alexander compared it to developing habits of good posture and lucid dreaming:
With a given average return per year, higher volatility will decrease your long-term returns. Index funds provide diversification by investing in a broad range of investments; concentrating your money in a few stocks doesn't, so if you pick stocks no better or worse than chance but don't diversify well, you will, on average, underperform index funds.
An even easier way to underperform index funds is to choose investments with high fees, such as actively managed mutual funds.
"Rationalists" advise to rely on the estimates of others, but that doesn't mean that being a "rationalist" inclines you, in the right circumstances and manner, to be heedful of others' opinions.
LW (viewed as a social experiment) tends to show that overestimation of techniques and stratagems purporting to enhance general rationality dominates over the advice to heed others.
For a concrete example: when trained in physics I looked down on everyone but those in physics and math. When I learned computer science I learned to appreciate that they knew a lot. So my biases adapted: I next looked down on everyone who wasn't technical, which included physics and computers.
I don't think I said that getting rid of biases spawned other biases. But your unconscious adapts all the time to the world around you, and to your conscious thoughts. After all the main way that you adapt to things is via your unconscious adapting.
This seems tremendously exaggerated, at least relative to my own life experience. I'm having trouble thinking of a single occasion where getting rid of one bias spawned another. Sometimes it produced enough clarity to *notice* another. And it's true that the rabbit hole goes very deep. But my mind behaves nothing like an intelligent adversary that adapts against me, and nothing like an efficient market in stupidity that has already adjusted for every heuristic that I can manage to invent. Perhaps people are different in this way as in others, and yet I still find this hard to imagine. Can we have some concrete examples of this from your life, please?
I can't prove a negative. What leads you to speculate that this is the case? Where's the evidence that causes you to believe unconscious minds are innovating?
Even if unconscious minds can copy strategies, some strategies are going to be weaker or stronger than others. Also, there shouldn't be an unlimited number of strategies. I think that there are lists of cognitive biases online which are extremely comprehensive, and that you'd be hard pressed to invent or discover a new form of bias.
I think we can observe significant differences in general rationality when we look at different people. Do you disagree? I think that preexisting intelligence plays a role in rationality differences but that its role must be limited, because there are people who are highly irrational yet also intelligent. No one is born with detailed knowledge of cognitive biases or how to combat them, yet some people can eventually counter them anyway. Learning must be involved.
I don't understand how you view biases as a Red Queen game and think biases adapt but also think that they can be overcome within specific limited domains. Biases aren't specific to any particular subject areas, they're general errors in logic. Beating biases in one area makes it easy to beat biases in others. If unconscious biases were adapting we'd expect people to become worse at general rationality as they struggled to even maintain skill in their area of specialization.
This study describes resisting system 1 and focusing on system 2 as the core and generalizable skill of resisting bias. http://qualitysafety.bmj.co...
At the very least, there are general and reliable ways to fight biases indirectly. Getting an adequate amount of sleep, for example. Or practicing mindfulness meditation. Or structuring one's environment with incentives to reduce bias and feedback mechanisms.
It is hubris to think that you have a strategy that would do worse than an index fund. If you did, just take the opposite of that strategy and, absent transaction costs, you would do better than an index fund.
One source of bias the choice of reference class. Essentially, you're trying to get less biased in situations where you don't get feedback based on those where you get feedback, which leaves you without feedback about your choice of reference class.
On a more empirical note, why are LWers intellectually arrogant when recalibration is handy. (Perhaps you deny the premise.)
Do you want to elaborate?
With a given average return per year, higher volatility will decrease your long-term returns. Index funds provide diversification by investing in a broad range of investments; concentrating your money in a few stocks doesn't, so if you pick stocks no better or worse than chance but don't diversify well, you will, on average, underperform index funds.
An even easier way to underperform index funds is to choose investments with high fees, such as actively managed mutual funds.
If you learn how to fight the automatic adoption of one set of mannerisms, you have the habits and knowledge needed to fight any other set.
Do you know of such a technique, or is this a stipulation?
If overcoming biases is truly a Red Queen game, then we *have* to play, if only to keep our biases from overwhelming us.
Hugely important
"Rationalists" advise to rely on the estimates of others, but that doesn't mean that being a "rationalist" inclines you, in the right circumstances and manner, to be heedful of others' opinions.
LW (viewed as a social experiment) tends to show that overestimation of techniques and stratagems purporting to enhance general rationality dominates over the advice to heed others.
Short the market?
I'm having trouble thinking of a single occasion where getting rid of one bias spawned another.
In light of what's evident, that's actually a very funny claim.
For a concrete example: when trained in physics I looked down on everyone but those in physics and math. When I learned computer science I learned to appreciate that they knew a lot. So my biases adapted: I next looked down on everyone who wasn't technical, which included physics and computers.
I don't think I said that getting rid of biases spawned other biases. But your unconscious adapts all the time to the world around you, and to your conscious thoughts. After all the main way that you adapt to things is via your unconscious adapting.
This seems tremendously exaggerated, at least relative to my own life experience. I'm having trouble thinking of a single occasion where getting rid of one bias spawned another. Sometimes it produced enough clarity to *notice* another. And it's true that the rabbit hole goes very deep. But my mind behaves nothing like an intelligent adversary that adapts against me, and nothing like an efficient market in stupidity that has already adjusted for every heuristic that I can manage to invent. Perhaps people are different in this way as in others, and yet I still find this hard to imagine. Can we have some concrete examples of this from your life, please?
I can't prove a negative. What leads you to speculate that this is the case? Where's the evidence that causes you to believe unconscious minds are innovating?
Even if unconscious minds can copy strategies, some strategies are going to be weaker or stronger than others. Also, there shouldn't be an unlimited number of strategies. I think that there are lists of cognitive biases online which are extremely comprehensive, and that you'd be hard pressed to invent or discover a new form of bias.
I think we can observe significant differences in general rationality when we look at different people. Do you disagree? I think that preexisting intelligence plays a role in rationality differences but that its role must be limited, because there are people who are highly irrational yet also intelligent. No one is born with detailed knowledge of cognitive biases or how to combat them, yet some people can eventually counter them anyway. Learning must be involved.
I don't understand how you view biases as a Red Queen game and think biases adapt but also think that they can be overcome within specific limited domains. Biases aren't specific to any particular subject areas, they're general errors in logic. Beating biases in one area makes it easy to beat biases in others. If unconscious biases were adapting we'd expect people to become worse at general rationality as they struggled to even maintain skill in their area of specialization.
This study describes resisting system 1 and focusing on system 2 as the core and generalizable skill of resisting bias. http://qualitysafety.bmj.co...
Here are a few other examples from an old LessWrong post. http://lesswrong.com/lw/76x...
At the very least, there are general and reliable ways to fight biases indirectly. Getting an adequate amount of sleep, for example. Or practicing mindfulness meditation. Or structuring one's environment with incentives to reduce bias and feedback mechanisms.
It is hubris to think that you have a strategy that would do worse than an index fund. If you did, just take the opposite of that strategy and, absent transaction costs, you would do better than an index fund.
I agree LWers are arrogant. I think they fail to recalibrate. But theoretically, recalibration has tremendous potential.
Thanks for the example, that makes sense.
One source of bias the choice of reference class. Essentially, you're trying to get less biased in situations where you don't get feedback based on those where you get feedback, which leaves you without feedback about your choice of reference class.
On a more empirical note, why are LWers intellectually arrogant when recalibration is handy. (Perhaps you deny the premise.)
Thank you for taking the time to succinctly show me what I was overlooking instead of just thinking "He doesn't have a clue" and moving on.