If I only have a few minutes, I tell people to study cognitive bias, in the hope that surely any intelligent person can see that understanding what science has to say about the systematic, predictable failings of our own brains can hardly fail to be useful. You need long enough to impart the caution that you have to apply these things to yourself, not just to other people...
I endeavor to learn from my mistakes. The last time I gave a talk on heuristics and biases, I started out by introducing the general concept by way of the conjunction fallacy and representativeness heuristic. And then I moved on to confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, sophisticated argument, motivated skepticism, and other attitude effects. I spent the next thirty minutes hammering on that theme, reintroducing it from as many different perspectives as I could.
I wanted to get my audience interested in the subject. Well, a simple description of conjunction fallacy and representativeness would suffice for that. But suppose they did get interested. Then what? The literature on bias is mostly cognitive psychology for cognitive psychology’s sake. I had to give my audience their dire warnings during that one lecture, or they probably wouldn’t hear them at all.
Whether I do it on paper, or in speech, I now try to never mention calibration and overconfidence unless I have first talked about disconfirmation bias, motivated skepticism, sophisticated arguers, and dysrationalia in the mentally agile. First, do no harm!
Yes, but before people would go and study cognitive bias, they have to be convinced that it exists in the first place! Most people are not already familiar with the idea that our minds systematically fail us.
I think the best way to introduce the idea would to present a striking case of bias (pervasiveness+impact). Then letting them know that there are many many others.
Seems to me that all that would do is reinforce someone’s opinion that probability theory is irrelevant to the real world.
I personally would start with confirmation bias, partly because there are lots of clear examples in pop culture. Like: last night I was watching a rerun of “Glee.” Will Schuester, a teacher and the glee-club advisor, is trying to quash a student’s crush. He sings her (Rachel) a medley of songs in which the singer is trying to deflect a much younger woman’s advances. (Actually, both songs—“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “Young Girl”—are actually about the singer unsuccessfully trying to resist the temptation of the younger woman, but in the episode the lyrics are changed and edited so that they ostensibly work.) So he sings, and the whole time Rachel is clearly hearing the opposite of the intended message. After the song, Will asks Rachel what his message was, and she says, almost giddily, that his message was clear: “I’m very young and it’s hard for you to stand close to me.”
If I only have a few minutes, I tell people to study cognitive bias, in the hope that surely any intelligent person can see that understanding what science has to say about the systematic, predictable failings of our own brains can hardly fail to be useful. You need long enough to impart the caution that you have to apply these things to yourself, not just to other people...
I agree, and I think Yudkowsky’s suggestions in Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People is appropriate, here:
Yes, but before people would go and study cognitive bias, they have to be convinced that it exists in the first place! Most people are not already familiar with the idea that our minds systematically fail us.
I think the best way to introduce the idea would to present a striking case of bias (pervasiveness+impact). Then letting them know that there are many many others.
I use the conjunction fallacy for my first illustration.
Seems to me that all that would do is reinforce someone’s opinion that probability theory is irrelevant to the real world.
I personally would start with confirmation bias, partly because there are lots of clear examples in pop culture. Like: last night I was watching a rerun of “Glee.” Will Schuester, a teacher and the glee-club advisor, is trying to quash a student’s crush. He sings her (Rachel) a medley of songs in which the singer is trying to deflect a much younger woman’s advances. (Actually, both songs—“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “Young Girl”—are actually about the singer unsuccessfully trying to resist the temptation of the younger woman, but in the episode the lyrics are changed and edited so that they ostensibly work.) So he sings, and the whole time Rachel is clearly hearing the opposite of the intended message. After the song, Will asks Rachel what his message was, and she says, almost giddily, that his message was clear: “I’m very young and it’s hard for you to stand close to me.”