Tag Archives: NearFar

Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias

By Robin Hanson · January 14, 2009 10:30 am · Comments (32)

Back in November I read this Science review by Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope on their awkwardly-named "Construal level theory", and wrote a post I estimated "to be the most dense with useful info on identifying our biases I've ever written":

[NEAR] All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. 

[FAR] Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits. 

Since then I've become even more impressed with it, as it explains most biases I know and care about, including muddled thinking about economics and the future.  For example, Ross's famous "fundamental attribution error" is a trivial application. 

The key idea is that when we consider the same thing from near versus far, different features become salient, leading our minds to different conclusions.  This is now my best account of disagreement.  We disagree because we explain our own conclusions via detailed context (e.g., arguments, analysis, and evidence), and others' conclusions via coarse stable traits (e.g., demographics, interests, biases).  While we know abstractly that we also have stable relevant traits, and they have detailed context, we simply assume we have taken that into account, when we have in fact done no such thing. 

For example, imagine I am well-educated and you are not, and I argue for the value of education and you argue against it.  I find it easy to dismiss your view as denigrating something you do not have, but I do not think it plausible I am mainly just celebrating something I do have.  I can see all these detailed reasons for my belief, and I cannot easily see and appreciate your detailed reasons. 

And this is the key error: our minds often assure us that they have taken certain factors into account when they have done no such thing.  I tell myself that of course I realize that I might be biased by my interests; I'm not that stupid.  So I must have already taken that possible bias into account, and so my conclusion must be valid even after correcting for that bias.  But in fact I haven't corrected for it much at all; I've just assumed that I did so.

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Test Near, Apply Far

By Robin Hanson · December 3, 2008 6:30 am · Comments (10)

Companies often ask me if prediction markets can forecast distant future topics.  I tell them yes, but that is not the place to test any doubts about prediction markets. To vet or validate prediction markets, you want topics where there will be many similar forecasts over a short time, with other mechanisms making forecasts that can be compared. 

If you came up with an account of the cognitive processes that allowed Newton or Einstein to make their great leaps of insight, you would want to look for where that or related accounts applied to more common insight situations.  An account that only applied to a few extreme "geniuses" would be much harder to explore, since we know so little about those few extreme cases.

If you wanted to explain the vast voids we seem to see in the distant universe, and you came up with a theory of a new kind of matter that could fill that void, you would want to ask where nearby one might find or be able to create that new kind of matter.  Only after confronting this matter theory with local data would you have much confidence in applying it to distant voids.

It is easy, way too easy, to generate new mechanisms, accounts, theories, and abstractions.  To see if such things are useful, we need to vet them, and that is easiest "nearby", where we know a lot.  When we want to deal with or understand things "far", where we know little, we have little choice other than to rely on mechanisms, theories, and concepts that have worked well near.  Far is just the wrong place to try new things.

There are a bazillion possible abstractions we could apply to the world.  For each abstraction, the question is not whether one can divide up the world that way, but whether it "carves nature at its joints", giving useful insight not easily gained via other abstractions.  We should be wary of inventing new abstractions just to make sense of things far; we should insist they first show their value nearby. 

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Abstract/Distant Future Bias

By Robin Hanson · November 26, 2008 12:30 am · Comments (34)

The latest Science has a psych article saying we think of distant stuff more abstractly, and vice versa.  "The brain is hierarchically organized with higher points in the cortical hierarchy representing increasingly more abstract aspects of stimuli"; activating a region makes nearby activations more likely.  This has stunning implications for our biases about the future. 

All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. 

Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits. 

Since these things mostly just cannot go together in reality, this must bias our thinking both about now and about distant futures.  When "in the moment," we focus on ourselves and in-our-face details, feel "one with" what we see and close to quirky folks nearby, see much as uncertain, and safely act to achieve momentary desires given what seems the most likely current situation.  Kinda like smoking weed.

Regarding distant futures, however, we’ll be too confident, focus too much on unlikely global events, rely too much on trends, theories, and loose abstractions, while neglecting details and variation.  We’ll assume the main events take place far away (e.g., space), and uniformly across large regions.  We’ll focus on untrustworthy consistently-behaving globally-organized social-others.  And we’ll neglect feasibility, taking chances to achieve core grand symbolic values, rather than ordinary muddled values.  Sound familiar?

Continue reading "Abstract/Distant Future Bias" »

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