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Jeff Cliff's avatar

There's another side of this that isn't about information, but who the students are getting the information from. Similar to the Milgram Experiment, the subjects in all of these experiments were *told* this information, they did not appear to learn it of their own volition. We learn information all the time, but maybe there's something special about signalling information *from those with power* that predisposes us to make a call?

The way to test this is going to be similar to how the Milgram experiment was replicated with different levels of authority. Everything from a real doctor(who's cultivated a persona of authority over a lifetime of practice) wearing a real lab coat telling you #misleading_G0348 to fellow fellow students, to non good looking, western, young educated, industrialized, rich, from democratic countries, etc. We should predict if this is a signalling thing that this bias should correlate with the level of authority or at least not correlate to the inverse.

Similarly...moderating whether or not there was any information given at all or not(and whether they were conscious of the fact) could be done, too. is "THE EXPERIMENT MUST GO ON" enough?

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Eliezer, whatever our cognitive process to decide how much to pay to gather how much info, it will have some knobs associated with how eager to be in various situations. If on average people seem to gather too much info, then we could suspect those knobs to have biased settings, and seek an explanation for that. My impression is that people tend to gather too much, and I offered an explanation, but of course I'll defer to a more careful data analysis.

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