The strategy to avoid a bias depends on the type of bias. Asking a different question is not (always) enough or the best idea.
The outside view helps in the cited cases of overconfidence,
For evalutation of false negative rates (the often used example of the mammographies e.g. in http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes) the method that works best is to use an example population and a graphical representation (a grid with the 4 sub populations marked). This is the same debiasing as used in the conjunction fallacy case above. Same goes for the base rate neglect.
For anchoring think an enemy provided the ‘misleading’ achor-information and instead ask what a friend might say about it..
Confirmation can be countered by imagining arguments an enemy might use (against which to defend) and then to use these as (counter)-examples. Using an imagined enemy is a simple and specific form of the outside view.
Framing can be avoided by trying to come up with differnt frames and averaging.
Availability bias and e.g. illusory correlation cannot really be coutnered because negative examples are just unavailable by nature. I’d recommend honesty and modesty in this case: If you see/remember some salient detail you can imaging the vast number of forgotten non-salient counter-examples and say: I will infer nothing until proven otherwise.
The strategy to avoid a bias depends on the type of bias. Asking a different question is not (always) enough or the best idea.
The outside view helps in the cited cases of overconfidence,
For evalutation of false negative rates (the often used example of the mammographies e.g. in http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes) the method that works best is to use an example population and a graphical representation (a grid with the 4 sub populations marked). This is the same debiasing as used in the conjunction fallacy case above. Same goes for the base rate neglect.
For anchoring think an enemy provided the ‘misleading’ achor-information and instead ask what a friend might say about it.. Confirmation can be countered by imagining arguments an enemy might use (against which to defend) and then to use these as (counter)-examples. Using an imagined enemy is a simple and specific form of the outside view.
Framing can be avoided by trying to come up with differnt frames and averaging.
Availability bias and e.g. illusory correlation cannot really be coutnered because negative examples are just unavailable by nature. I’d recommend honesty and modesty in this case: If you see/remember some salient detail you can imaging the vast number of forgotten non-salient counter-examples and say: I will infer nothing until proven otherwise.