Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot (2012)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22663351/

by rzk • 3 years ago

114 153 3 years ago

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

History is full of talented people who squandered their talents onto meaningless endeavours.

Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his scientific knowledge and logical reasoning he wasted the second half of his life trying to turn other metals into gold, alchemy - based nothing more than biblical text.

Big brain does not prevent ideological blindness.

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

Newton was a complex person and I think this is an overly reductive take on both his life and study of alchemy.

heavenlyblue• 3 years ago

Is the next thing you are going to say that it's an overly reductive take on the alchemy as described in The Bible?

hprotagonist• 3 years ago

a more apt vignette from newton’s life is that he absolutely lost his shirt on speculative investments in a bubble that collapsed and took one of the finest minds to the cleaners.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his scientific knowledge and logical reasoning he wasted the second half of his life trying to turn other metals into gold, alchemy - based nothing more than biblical text.

Prior to the atomic model invented several hundred years later, given there was examples of metals turning into other metals (i.e. iron turning into steel, copper turning into brass)...

I don't think there was much of a reason to think that the transmutation of metals into Gold wouldn't be possible. And it in fact sort of turns out to be possible in certain circumstances. We can make gold from lead (although it requires a particle accelerator).

zmgsabst• 3 years ago

Alchemists being “wrong” is like Michelson-Morley “failing”:

More branding than reality, since we accomplished their projects later — transmuting elements and detecting the aether.

Ironically, this seems to be a cognitive bias — we never update our first impression nor put together a story across terminology changes. Carlo Rovelli gives an interesting talk on how we’re too quick to dismiss ancient scholars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5-KLvvMGM&t=1199s

largepeepee2• 3 years ago

Certainly there is that possibly, problem is where he stemmed his research from - biblical text.

He used dates and accounts of ancient myths for many of his data points.

Combing the bible over and over for clues, wasting much of his talent and decades on false leads.

Flawed research leading to dead ends despite his brilliance.

Which is the point of the post, intelligence does not make one immune to bias.

stocknoob• 3 years ago

After inventing modern physics and calculus I’d think I had the golden touch, too.

Newton took a lot of intellectual paths, from tinkering with prisms to thinking about the paths of the heavens. Only looking back can we say “oh, you wasted your time investigating x and y, but z was right on. Why didn’t you just bat 1000?”

mogacom• 3 years ago

Historical context is important to take into account with Newton. He had no idea he was doing "science" as opposed to something else. He was trying to systematically investigate the natural world in an environment largely composed of ignorance and myth, which he was also part of. Wasn't alchemy simply chemistry before chemistry had been developed into a well-defined field of study? His obsession with the dimensions of Solomon's temple is a little hard to understand though!

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

It seems he was just overly credulous. Yes, he was very Christian, but I imagine if he got some ancient text from China on how to transmute lead to gold he would give it a shot

tmn• 3 years ago

I'll ignore the argument that alchemy was a precursor to modern science. An iron man version of 'lead to gold' is that it was never about literally turning lead to gold (which modern science can do).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

'Esoteric interpretations of historical texts'

From this lens, alchemy becomes a form of spiritual meditation. You can argue that such things are meaningless endeavors. But this is itself a subjective take. What are meaningful endeavors really?

If I want to take a nihilistic frame, I'll strengthen your comment and say it's impossible to avoid meaningless endeavors.

Inevitably one must pick their bias and arrive at their narrative.

asdff4• 3 years ago

Newton was right that you could turn lead into gold, but it wasn't his fault that nuclear science needed to advance a few hundred years before someone ran that actual experiment.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases.

This is the worst part. Being fully aware that people are biased and that you are not a special exception to that isn't helpful. You're still just as likely to let bias influence your actions, and you'll probably try to justify yourself as having good reasons for your biased actions.

yamrzou• 3 years ago

That's why we need feedback from others.

“A system cannot understand itself without help from outside the system, because prior experiences will bias objectivity, preventing critical analysis of the organization.” — Edward Deming

luckylion• 3 years ago

How often can you get feedback from someone until they've become part of your system and are no longer an outsider?

aatd86• 3 years ago

Until you realize that part of you is a black box to others and only you have access to some of your internal state.

So, yes and no. That's why self awareness, perhaps via proper meditation, although I thought it was some hippy shit at first, is actually valuable.

yodsanklai2• 3 years ago

You're still just as likely to let bias influence your actions, and you'll probably try to justify yourself as having good reasons for your biased actions.

I really don't think everybody is equally biased. Some people at least try to use reason and science to guide their beliefs, why other will systematically deny all evidences. Also people who are aware of biases are more likely to recognize their errors when called out with logical arguments.

SamoyedFurFluff3• 3 years ago

I’m a little confused by this because I don’t know if it’s possible to measure biases and proclaim that someone is more biased than the other. One of the things that comes to mind is that one person may have weakly held or strongly held bias (maybe differentiating being biased to being bigoted?). How do you compare multiple weakly held biases vs one very strongly held one? How do you count biases when you yourself are also biased and therefore will very likely undercount any biases aligning with your own?

naasking3• 3 years ago

why other will systematically deny all evidences

Sure, but they also do so for specific reasons, like that considering evidence failed them in the past in some significant way. Possibly they just didn't do it right, but it's just incorrect to think people are the way they are for no logical reason.

boomboomsubban3• 3 years ago

This sounds pretty close to a standard bias blind spot. Do you consider yourself more or less biased than the average person?

michaelt• 3 years ago

Available from the coauthor's website at http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_fil...

qikInNdOutReply• 3 years ago

There is a whole interleafing flower petal of mental bug categorys:

Detectable | Undetectable

Fixable | Unfixable

Workaround | No-Workaround

Cost of workaround (Big O)

Individual | Society

Non-Meta | Meta (Bug is created by several other bugs recombining into a functional or dysfunctional cluster)

Some bugs you cant fix, cause society depends on it while also suffering with it. Humanity sized Behaviour DBs and Datamining is the real Psychology!

tootie• 3 years ago

My layman observation was always that being intelligent and being rational are two completely different things. It's how you get people who have high technical achievement but still hold on to odd beliefs or get sucked into conspiracies.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

As the bumper sticker says: "No shit." Intelligence in one domain does not necessarily translate to all areas. There are uncountable millions of gifted people who are low functioning in other domains.

Contrary to this are the individual fallacies of overconfidence and the collective fallacy of the genius halo effect.

There is also a tendency to failure aversion by avoid domains outside of performant ones.

The safest assumption is: 1. Your areas outside of performant ones are lacking until proven otherwise with feedback. 2. Don't worry about not being an omnipotent polyglot, polymath. Seek excellence, just don't go crazy or drive everyone else nuts. Theory of mind and frame taking by considering putting yourself in others' proverbial shoes isn't necessarily something people are born with, it has to be taught and learned. Some people do have harder times because they have to intellectualize it if they are emotionally disconnected from others and/or themselves, or have a neurotype that doesn't lend itself to smooth observation of social and situational state of others.

peatmoss• 3 years ago

This is one of those things where I’ve lived the XKCD comic (https://xkcd.com/793/).

I once had a job where I was part of the supporting technical crew for some very smart people with some truly impressive accomplishments. A colleague and I sometimes groused about the challenges of working with “universal domain specialists.”

dkarl• 3 years ago

Tests and version control... why do you bother with all that ceremony? It seems like a lot of work that could go towards making the code better.

To play devil's advocate, though, I do think that something is lost if everyone stops themselves from asking questions on the grounds that everyone has good reasons for everything they do and therefore there's no point having thoughts about someone else's job. Even if you assume the first part, the second doesn't follow. Understanding other people's jobs helps you work better with them, and if you don't understand the purpose of something they're doing, that probably indicates an opportunity to understand them better. Second, looking at it from the other side, we all benefit from answering beginner questions. What's the difference between the innocence of a child and the innocence of somebody who has studied physics their whole life and never had to support a piece of software? When children, or physicists, ask questions that are hard for us to answer, we can learn something in the attempt.

The only difference between being posed "dumb" questions by a child and an adult from another field is if they think you're an idiot. (Honestly, that isn't even a difference. We just don't mind if children walk around thinking adults are all idiots most of the time. We expect differently from them after they grow up.)

Reading between the lines, I think some people regard the momentary joy of thinking you see something that someone else doesn't as a bit of corruption in the soul, a moral root cause. I don't think it's a bad thing, though. Imagine playing chess against someone much better than you and getting excited because you think you can take a piece and get a winning advantage. The odds are very high that you are wrong, or that you're going to take the piece and then lose anyway, but what are you going to do? You're going to take the piece, pose them the question! Or else there's no fun in playing the game. Some people would argue that the excitement that arises in your mind at that point is wrong, not just in the sense of not being supported by reason, but a morally wrong response, arrogant, disrespectful of the better player, a toxic feeling that we should strive to eliminate and certainly strive not to show to other people. But it isn't necessarily, and we don't have to take it that way.

Where it can change from innocent to annoying and even toxic, depending on how people handle it, is when the expert can't provide an answer that satisfies the innocent. At that point the innocent (or the expert) might get angry or condescending, or might simply badger the other person in a time-wasting way, insisting that the matter can't be dropped until agreement is reached. Or one or both of them might walk away thinking the other person is an idiot.

But that doesn't have to happen. They can let it go gracefully. The innocent can walk away thinking, "I don't understand their reason for doing that," the expert can walk away thinking, "I don't know how to explain it to someone with their background," and they both have food for further thought.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

Trying to "math" love, joy, sadness, etc. The "logic" or "calculus" is to stop thinking and start feeling. Easy to say, but can come with time, patience, and generosity through vulnerability. Find the good and the joy in this short life and don't waste it on anything else.

Christ, I sound like a minister giving an unsolicited sermon at the holiday festival.

Hope and perseverance are the essential ingredients.

If you're bad with (people, men, women), then do the hard work to not be.

If you suck at math, ball up that judgment and set it outside.

If you have a dead-end job, starting a business is paperwork and office furniture. Find something (action or item) people will pay more for than it costs but give a little extra than they paid for. Be rational, honest, reasonable, and work as smartly and consistently as possible. It's not easy, but there is much potential power in one's own hands and mind. Now, I sound like Anthony Robins. :)

maCDzP2• 3 years ago

How does members of the HN crowd try to combat this?

Or is it just another exercise in futility where the actual exercise is just part of the thing that make me biased in the first place?

I’ll go first. I see a therapist every other week. I hope that gives me an outsiders point of view.

But I think I have identified a way to know where my biases are could be strong. When I get a really uneasy feeling when I start to think about making changes in a certain area. And I don’t know if it’s a rational fear or just a sunk cost fallacy.

What I find really scary is that I have hard time understanding if I am just fooling myself or being rational. Because it’s always my own mind coming up with explanations, so the actual process looks the same to me.

I read a book called “Quit” recently and it gave me a lot to think about regarding biases and quitting different endeavors. Can recommend.

jvanderbot4• 3 years ago

I try to fully rationalize the opposing viewpoints. To the point that I cannot disdain anyone for taking those viewpoints because I completely understand why they would think that way, and can see my own self from their POV.

It does not at all prevent me from having bias, but it at least, with effort, on a case by case basis, lets me adopt someone else's bias.

After all, there is no unbiased person so what's the point?

csours2• 3 years ago

I try to fully rationalize the opposing viewpoints.

Edit: "Both Sides"-ing an issue can be dangerous. Many times, there is actual harm on one side, and mere discomfort on the other. You may not be describing "both sides"-ing; but this could be read that way.

I would say it as "identify the deeply held beliefs that got this person to their viewpoint"

Previous statement:

This can be dangerous, depending on how it is done. I would say it as "identify the deeply held beliefs that got this person to their viewpoint"

kilgnad12• 3 years ago

How far can you take it? Can you talk about implementing eugenics? Because scientifically it's not a completely invalid idea.

Preventing people with genetic defects and recessive carriers of genetic defects from reproducing whether through execution or restriction does definitively eliminate the defect if such policies were implemented well.

The short period of suffering during the culling has the reward of completely eliminating the targeted genetic diseases.

I find that it is rare to find someone who is able to think rationally about the topic above. A lot of people have to rearrange the logic of potential solutions such that it fits within a moral framework. They cannot disentangle the logic and keep their analysis completely separate from their own ethics.

Executing someone with a genetic defects is logically speaking the most definitive way to stop that genetic defect from spreading. Restriction costs resources and has the potential for failure.

You see what I'm saying? Being completely unbiased is a form of psychopathy. But it does let you see truths others are unable to see. Eugenics targeted at actual known genetic defects in both sufferers and recessive carriers does logically lead to a better outcome then the moral path. If you just let natural selection play out the defect could just stick around causing suffering across many many generations of people.

But this is the extreme example. The extreme example triggers moral reactions which in turn becomes a mirror to your biases.

A more realistic example is: "do I eliminate the jobs of everyone whose livelihood depends on success in the oil industry to stave off the impending catastrophe of global warming?"

Koshkin4• 3 years ago

rationalize the opposing viewpoints

Putting oneself in the other’s place is the least one can do. But in politics, for example, all you will find is that there’s no right or wrong but rather opposing interests (of which there may be more then two). Then all you can do is start to appeal to the irrational - faith (religion), hope (expectations), love (e.g. patriotism), etc.

SamoyedFurFluff3• 3 years ago

I would say isn’t it useful to simply acknowledge you can be deeply flawed all the time and your experiences of reality will always be slanted with your subjective opinions on how society works, that everyone else is also doing the same thing, and continue onwards anyways? There’s no way to escape our own imperfections. We have some tools to help us mitigate them, but they will always be there.

brookst3• 3 years ago

That seems fairly defeatist. I’ve gotten better at some things I used to be terrible at, and it took work to do so. And I’m happier for it, while still being plenty imperfect.

bheadmaster2• 3 years ago

Knowledge itself is a bias against things you don't know.

bugbuddy• 3 years ago

This is not what bias means.

csours2• 3 years ago

The human mind appears to have evolved in a tribal system, and it appears to be predisposed to tribal thinking. As for myself, I try to think of my tribe as all of humanity. You're all my cousins; some of you are knuckleheads, some of you are dangerous, but you're all my cousins.

I like the book "The Righteous Mind". It took me a month to read; it's emotionally difficult, not intellectually difficult. You can't blame people for their gender or skin tone; you also can't blame them for how they were raised - people pick up deeply held beliefs as children that are very hard to see or address.

What I find really scary is that I have hard time understanding if I am just fooling myself or being rational. Because it’s always my own mind coming up with explanations, so the actual process looks the same to me.

The mind is a rationalizing system. It makes things you do feel rational. After I left organized religion, I fell in love with rational skepticism. Then I found that most public "skepticism" is just debunking, not gathering evidence for things you should believe in; and that most "rationality" is just post-hoc rationalization of existing beliefs.

wanderingstan• 3 years ago

Seconding the book "The Righteous Mind". Was hard to accept the point that landed against “my” usual political side, but his point are valid, and only more applicable since it was published ten (?) years ago.

codethief• 3 years ago

The human mind appears to have evolved in a tribal system, and it appears to be predisposed to tribal thinking.

I learned about this was when someone posted this article on HN some years ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200808051003/https://nautil.us...

maCDzP2• 3 years ago

Hehe, I like the thought of having and being cousin knucklehead.

I’ll have to check out the book you recommended. Speaking of righteousness, I have noticed in myself that it’s a very addictive feeling. I get off on it. I don’t think that’s a good thing though.

IIAOPSW2• 3 years ago

how do you know if its all a dream? Because the top doesn't stop spinning.

You need a top for testing rationality. Here's a nearly definitional one: you're being rationale when your explanation convinces people other than just you.

robgibbons• 3 years ago

Being convincing does not equal rational. There are many logical fallacies that are convincing on the surface but don't stand up to rational scrutiny.

kilgnad12• 3 years ago

People on hackernews especially suffer from this because a lot of programmers tie their identity to being smart. Its the worst place to ask for advice against this because the people answering you are likely the most confidently biased people.

The happier and more confident someone is the more biased they tend to be.

The less confident someone is the less biased they tend to be.

Because you use the word "scared" I'm thinking you're not a confident person and therefore you're highly highly unbiased.

As a human, to live a happy life, we are evolved to be more biased then not. It is the cruel irony in life that your quest to seek the unbiased truth leads to less happiness.

I'm too lazy to cite this but there is actual research showing this. People who lie to themselves tend to be happier and more successful and people who are more honest with themselves... Tend to suffer from depression.

If you don't believe a word I say, then great, you're doing well. And you're really smart! Leave me a snappy reply showing how you disagree then go on and live your life.

If you agree with this post, then I'm sorry.

Koshkin4• 3 years ago

programmers tie their identity to being smart

And not just programmers themselves: more than once I have heard a manager say, Let’s ask a programmer, they are smart!

smiley1437• 3 years ago

A little humility goes a long way for correcting biases

asdf123wtf• 3 years ago

Here's my little folk "wisdom" addendum to your great point:

* Try to replace any judginess you feel, with curiosity

(Easier said than done - but a little humility is a great first step towards getting to that curious state of mind)

Curiosity places understanding something ahead of justifying something. It makes self-interrogation easier and less threatening to the ego. It makes engaging with those who hold differing beliefs more about understanding/exploring, and less like doing battle.

That's my theory anyways, but it could be my bias talking.

And I fail at taking my own advice, often. ;P

evv5552• 3 years ago

How does members of the HN crowd try to combat this?

I think what can be lost in these conversations is the differentiation of a cognitive capacity and the drives to use that capacity. What are the conditions that have lead to your drive for empathic perspective taking? What are these conditions and are these conditions scalable to the world at large?

blfr• 3 years ago

Are these biases wrong though? In a hypothetical perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum world, yes, but in reality you probably want some outcome bias for example because you don't control all the variables.

So the analysis of perception of that bias and bias blind spot strike me as interesting but rather useless.

naasking3• 3 years ago

They're wrong if you're interested in truth, just maybe not wrong if you're interested in reproductive fitness. We're not so concerned about the latter these days so much as the former.

lumb633• 3 years ago

Your comment gave me an interesting way to think about biases: Bayesian statistics. It is no wonder we see people end up at vastly different conclusions when their starting point (bias) is so different. Coupled with this, bias is probably correlated with experiences to some extent, leading two different individuals to entirely different conclusions.

This is a good argument for devolution, IMO. Today’s politics is too large-scale and winner-take-all to accurately represent all its constituents. For instance, a topic like immigration in the US has no solution that will appease everyone, because there are so many different viewpoints that conflict with each other. We should let smaller populations with a higher level of concurrence govern themselves accordingly.

asdff4• 3 years ago

On the other hand, maybe the only population size sufficient to have a high level of concurrence in thought is 1 individual. Maybe there are weird effects going on with individual preferences as population gets small. Consider you and a spouse deciding on dinner, you want pasta they want tacos. Complete disagreement. Imagine you now have a kid, they want tacos too. Maybe given the population size, you soften your convictions on the pasta, and opt for the tacos since the majority is leaning that way. A phenomenon like this, whether it is real or not, would screw up the small pop is more agreeable model, for example.

xyzelement7• 3 years ago

I observe something like this in the way people react to what's going on in the news.

Example: compared to most people, I am "better" positioned to understand what's going on in Ukraine - my dad and both inlaws are from there and speak the language. I grew up in former USSR and speak fluent Russian so I can also watch and read things closer to the source.

And yet, I don't claim to understand anything that's going on in Ukraine because ~none~ of the information I see can be considered unbiased. So I can chose to believe one set but not the other set of data or I can say "I am not equipped to understand this."

Meanwhile, tons of people who are objectively less equipped to suss out the situation, don't feel this hesitation to have an opinion. Intellectually, if you ask them 'does propaganda exist, and is it amped up in a war situation' they will say 'of course, every time' and then they'll go and believe what they read (be in in a Western or Russian source, doesn't matter.)

This is not a complaint, it's actually something quite empowering to understand.

ag315• 3 years ago

This is a really excellent point, both in general and vis a vis the conflict in Ukraine. Something I see happening often is that some people are quick to confuse expertise-as-credential with expertise-as-substance, or to assume that anyone who has above average knowledge of some relevant subject area that relates to some aspect of the war is immune to emotionally biased interpretations.

kulahan• 3 years ago

This was recently on display with the Ghost of Kyiv killing over 850,000 enemy platoons with a single bullet. I'm sure it was born out of some interesting story - maybe a rookie had a good dogfight or something, but BOY did that story grow and grow.

My only question is: how much propaganda came from states, vs. people taking an idea and running with it because it's a narrative they want to hear?

8f2ab37a-ed6c4• 3 years ago

Or the rumors of mobile cremation chambers to incinerate corpses of crimes against humanity victims which circulated in the first few weeks, including copious photos, which all turned out to be some random heavy equipment.

im3w1l• 3 years ago

In the end there is an imperative to act*. Even if we don't understand as well as we'd like, we don't get to just shrug and say "I dunno". We have to go with our best guess (perhaps hedging a bit against other possibilities) and hope for the best. Yes we might be misled by propaganda. Still we must act.

* I'm defining act broadly here as any kind of policy choice. Sending humanitarian aid, or not sending it. Sending military aid or not sending it. Voicing our support, or not voicing our support. Encouraging surrender, or not encouraging surrender.

pharrington4• 3 years ago

Are you saying that the information about Russia's war is unduly biased? I ask because all communication is biased, obviously to very different degrees, and for very different reasons.

I try to be as open and honest as possible about my biases, and constantly reexamine my current and past beliefs.

s1artibartfast3• 3 years ago

What do you mean by unduly biased.

Bias, at least for me, means erroneous or misleading.

I think all people are biased and imperfect, but that doesn't mean that all communication is biased. Unbiased communication takes a lot more work, but isn't impossible.

faeriechangling2• 3 years ago

Yeah it’s a war, there isn’t much more bias information you’re going to see. I looked into half the stories Google promoted me when I did a random search about an Ukraine topic and it was basically all US MSM which cited “experts” that were former US intelligence. This also held true for Bing because appearantly US MSM is the place to get unbiased reputable information about the war in Ukraine (???)

The only place I could get a different view was Yandex who rigged their search results to show a bunch of small anti-US bloggers since the Ruskies run Yandex. Also RT right near the top.

So I have to choose between a bunch of shills the US and it’s MSM puppets promoted, or a bunch of shills the Russians promoted plus some bloggers who would believe the US is responsible for cancer and heart disease.

None of these search engines promote sources which could be seen as relatively neutral like Al Jazeera or Chinese news or whatever. I never see people promote random substacks of independent media. Almost everything I read about this war is planted by government shills of one sort or another that are boosting search results and so on. I was around for the Iraq war and yeah that war made it incredibly obvious how THROUGHLY untrustworthy the mainstream media is regarding war reporting and their love of killing the innocent with lies. I’ve fallen for propaganda before because it’s impossible not to because there’s such a freaking torrent of it.

georgeburdell• 3 years ago

I haven’t been following the news lately but early on in the war it was obvious to me that the U.S. media was at least minimizing reports of Ukranian casualties, and possibly inflating those of Russia. This is “expected” since we are aligned with the former

bawolff4• 3 years ago

It should go without saying that any coverage of a war is going to be extremely biased, doubly so from places that are participating in it (including usa, because they clearly have a strong geopolitical interest in the outcome)

That is just how war works.

xyzelement7• 3 years ago

It took me a while to parse your comment, but I am glad I did.

I don't know about "unduly" but I'd say that out of all situations, war is probably the one where we can except the most extreme bias.

War literally means "we are willing to kill and die to win this" - so obviously "lie and spin" is going to happen whenever possible.

marsten• 3 years ago

You only realize how uninformed the media is when it covers something you know very well. I experienced this in grad school when Newsweek magazine profiled some work my lab was doing (physics), and they made a lot of simple mistakes we could've easily corrected.

oofnik• 3 years ago

This is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

FrontierPsych• 3 years ago

"Truth is the first casualty of war" goes the saying.

asdff4• 3 years ago

At the end of the day, people like a black and white narrative that they can keep all in their head. Even if you had all the facts at hand for a given situation, there are too many factors interacting with each other in different ways for any one person to actually understand what is happening. You only ever gleam bits and pieces of the actual interaction network between these nodes, and your brain looks to build out the paths as best as it can guess if they are unknown, like a Rorschach test where your brain sees an elephant in spilled ink.

Given all of this, its probably best not to focus so much of ones thoughts and efforts on these things you will never fully understand, things that really don't make a difference in your day to day life, systemic things you can't even change even if they did, when there is just too much to focus on that's much more pressing in life where you can make some actionable changes, like the events that take place right in your neighborhood or in your very home. News is fine for entertainment, but people should see it as such, not the absolute source of truth (if there even is such a thing given all the latent variables for anything at all).

Of course, there's no money in convincing people to go work out, clean up their house, read some books to improve their skills, to tinker on some personal project. There is plenty of money in convincing people to put all of that aside, however, and be locked into the content you drip out thats coated in advertisement, so that's where the incentives lie. Not in self help or betterment, but in maximizing the return these organizations get from offering you as a product for their customers whose business exists to milk you of your wages.

d0mine3• 3 years ago

btw, "ignore facts, you can't understand it" may be just a world view pushed by propaganda.

Some things are so huge, they become obvious if you just try to think & consider some numbers.

xyzelement7• 3 years ago

What do you mean? How do you distinguish between what's obvious because it's obvious vs it's obvious because you've been shown the dots to connect?

Things you have first hand experience with, I can agree you can decide is obvious.. anything where your main source of information is the news/internet? Not a chance

apienx• 3 years ago

It'd be interesting to see how the Skeptics and other bias-aware groups perform. It's hard to imagine the folks at the Center For Applied Rationally doing just as bad as the average Joe.

It's hard to believe that you can't train yourself into hypervigilance and extraordinary awareness. Practicing with intent is a very different animal from "cognitive sophistication" (however the paper defines it).

8f2ab37a-ed6c4• 3 years ago

The science seems to show that it's very hard (possibly almost impossible) to de-bias yourself, which is why humans have to rely rely on other humans with outside perspective as a counter-balancing force. This assumes that conflict of opinions is welcome and accepted by the group, which is unfortunately not always the case, leading to echo chambers and groups confirming and reinforcing existing beliefs.

jgeada• 3 years ago

You cannot be an expert in everything, it is impossible; the domain of human knowledge and experience has grown too vast for anyone to be conversant with anything more than a minor fraction. So, sooner or later, either you distrust everything and you become a conspiracy theorist or you rely on experts. Who you choose to trust as experts gives you a bias.

My personal observation (ie read this as anecdote, not data) is that skeptics frequently choose to select as their expert the lone dissenter in the field. My interpretation is not that the skeptics I know are truly skeptics, they're contrarians who don't trust institutional knowledge or consensus.

asdff4• 3 years ago

Chomsky writes about the expert effect in Manufacturing Consent.

Basically, among credentialed experts on any given topic, you can find opinions going every which way. So bringing in an expert to bolster your point is meaningless, because they are brought in because of their preexisting opinions which as you note sometimes run against the rest of the field. Another technique is to bring in someone with contrary opinions and one with favorable opinions, and basically not give them much shot to speak or force them on the defensive for everything they say with both your expert and the moderator. Then you can say you soundly defeated that critical opinion of the topic.

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

My methodology, such as it is, goes like:

1) Receive information.

2) Assume that I am being lied to, manipulated, shaded, data elided, whatever, sometimes by accident, sometimes by intent, but at least several levels removed from whomever delivers the information.

3) Seek out information that says the exact opposite.

4) Repeat Step 2.

5) Start looking for little tricks: what has been left out? If we are judging person X for act Y, are we not judging other parties for Y? Is the timing convenient for a distraction?

6) Resign myself to a state of uncertainty in a world of lies.

2devnull• 3 years ago

A lot of great comments here about the difficulty recognizing one’s own biases. A related thing I like to think about is the jungian concept of the shadow; if we can see it, it’s not the shadow.

I do think we can look for evidence that we are at least limiting the impact of our biases. For example, if you don’t change political affiliations at least once or twice in your lifetime, that’s probably a sign you’re controlled by your biases and not really as free or rational as is optimal. What’s the old saying, if you aren’t a liberal in your youth you have no heart; if you aren’t conservative as you get older you have no brain. But I think moving in the opposite direction is also a good indicator of free thinking. A foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds. Dynamic thinking is the only real thinking. We should grow and evolve overtime.

nate_770• 3 years ago

http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_fil...

Here’s a link to the full study.

Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot (2012)

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