Also, if I may be permitted to make a more general criticism in response to this post, I would say that while the article appears to be well-researched, it has demonstrated some of the worst problems I commonly notice on this forum. The same goes for the majority of the comments, even though many are knowledgeable and informative. What I have in mind is the fixation on concocting theories about human behavior and society based on various idées fixes and leitmotifs that are parts of the intellectual folklore here, while failing to notice issues suggested by basic common sense that are likely to be far more important.
Thus the poster notices that these models are not used in practice despite considerable evidence in their favor, and rushes to propose cognitive biases à la Kahneman & Tversky as the likely explanation. This without even stopping to think of two questions that just scream for attention. First, what is the importance of the fact that just about any issue of sorting out people is nowadays likely to be ideologically charged and legally dangerous? Second, what about the fact that these models are supposed to throw some high-status people out of work, and in a way that makes them look like they’ve been incompetent all along?
Regardless of whether various hypotheses based on these questions have any merit, the fact that someone could write a post without even giving them the slightest passing attention, offering instead a blinkered explanation involving the standard old LW/OB folklore, and still get upvoted to +40 is, in my opinion, indicative of some severe and widespread biases.
My intent was to summarize the literature on SPRs, not provide an account for why they are not used more widely. I almost didn’t include that sentence at all. Surely, more analysis would be important to have in a post intending to discuss the psychological issues involved in our reaction to SPRs, but that was not my subject.
In pointing to cognitive biases as an explanation, I was merely repeating what Bishop & Trout & Dawes have suggested on the matter, not making up my own explanations in light of LW lore.
In fact, the arrows point the other way. Many of the authors cited in my article worked closely with people like Kahneman who are the original academic sources of much of LW lore.
Edit: I’ve added a clause about the source of the “cognitive biases” suggestion, in case others are tempted to make the same mistaken assumption as you made.
While this post has +40 upvotes, the majority of the top-voted comments are skeptical of it. I think this represents confusion as to how to upvote, although this is merely a hypothesis. The article surveys a very interesting topic that is right in the sweet spot of interest for this community, it also appears scholarly, however the conclusions synthesized by the author strike me as naive and I suspect that’s also the conclusion of the majority. Whether it deserves an upvote is debateable. I downvoted.
I felt the confusion you are talking about. If readers could be expected to read the top-voted replies (RTFC), then the current distribution of votes would be ideal: The interesting article gets some well-deserved attention, and the skeptical replies give a counterbalance. But if readers don’t read the comments, then frankly I think this article got too many upvotes when compared to many others.
Offtopic: Is there a meta thread somewhere discussing the semantics of votes? I am happy that we don’t use slashdot’s baroque insightful/interesting/funny distinctions, but some consensus about the meaning of +1 would be nice.
I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
The second reason is invalid unless the actor is self-deluding—a smart actor that faces being put out of work would silently adopt a SPR as his decision-making system without admitting to it. Since the superiority of SPR continues in many fields, either relevant actors are consistently not smart, performance is not a significant contributing criterion to their success, or they’re self-deluding ie. overrating their own judgment as the poster stated. [edit] I’d guess a combination of the last two.
Yes, I’d say it’s a combination of the last two points, with emphasis on the second last.
The critical question is whether maximizing the accuracy of your judgments is a practical way to get ahead in a given profession. Sometimes that is indeed the case, and in such fields we indeed see tremendous efforts to automate as much expert work as possible, often with great success, as in the electronics industry. But in professions that operate as more tightly-knit guilds, adherence to accepted standards is much more important than any objective metrics of effectiveness. Stepping outside of standard work procedures is often treated as a serious infraction with potentially severe consequences. (Especially if your non-standard methodology fails in some particular case, as it will sooner or later, and you can’t cover your ass by claiming that you followed all the standard accepted procedures and having your profession back you up organizationally.)
Now, you could try enhancing your work with decision models in secret. But even then, it’s hard to do it in a completely secretive way, and moreover, human minds being what they are, most people can achieve professional success only if they are really sincerely convinced in their expertise and effectiveness. Keeping a public facade is hard for everyone except a very small minority of people.
First, what is the importance of the fact that just about any issue of sorting out people is nowadays likely to be ideologically charged and legally dangerous? Second, what about the fact that these models are supposed to throw some high-status people out of work, and in a way that makes them look like they’ve been incompetent all along?
I am not sure what you think the answers to these questions are, but I would say my personal opinion on the matter is that the more ideologically charged and legally dangerous a matter is, the more important accuracy and correctness—at the expense, if necessary, of strongly-held beliefs. I would also say that protecting the reputation of competency enjoyed by high-status people is not an activity that strongly correlates with being right; I predict a small negative correlation, in fact.
Furthermore, there is a selection effect: learning the LW/OB folklore will result in you noticing specific cases of their application, and you are far, far more likely to write a post about that any about any given subject. That is, you see a prevalence of “standard bias explanation” because top-level posters are actively looking for actual cases of bias to discuss.
Also, if I may be permitted to make a more general criticism in response to this post, I would say that while the article appears to be well-researched, it has demonstrated some of the worst problems I commonly notice on this forum. The same goes for the majority of the comments, even though many are knowledgeable and informative. What I have in mind is the fixation on concocting theories about human behavior and society based on various idées fixes and leitmotifs that are parts of the intellectual folklore here, while failing to notice issues suggested by basic common sense that are likely to be far more important.
Thus the poster notices that these models are not used in practice despite considerable evidence in their favor, and rushes to propose cognitive biases à la Kahneman & Tversky as the likely explanation. This without even stopping to think of two questions that just scream for attention. First, what is the importance of the fact that just about any issue of sorting out people is nowadays likely to be ideologically charged and legally dangerous? Second, what about the fact that these models are supposed to throw some high-status people out of work, and in a way that makes them look like they’ve been incompetent all along?
Regardless of whether various hypotheses based on these questions have any merit, the fact that someone could write a post without even giving them the slightest passing attention, offering instead a blinkered explanation involving the standard old LW/OB folklore, and still get upvoted to +40 is, in my opinion, indicative of some severe and widespread biases.
My intent was to summarize the literature on SPRs, not provide an account for why they are not used more widely. I almost didn’t include that sentence at all. Surely, more analysis would be important to have in a post intending to discuss the psychological issues involved in our reaction to SPRs, but that was not my subject.
In pointing to cognitive biases as an explanation, I was merely repeating what Bishop & Trout & Dawes have suggested on the matter, not making up my own explanations in light of LW lore.
In fact, the arrows point the other way. Many of the authors cited in my article worked closely with people like Kahneman who are the original academic sources of much of LW lore.
Edit: I’ve added a clause about the source of the “cognitive biases” suggestion, in case others are tempted to make the same mistaken assumption as you made.
While this post has +40 upvotes, the majority of the top-voted comments are skeptical of it. I think this represents confusion as to how to upvote, although this is merely a hypothesis. The article surveys a very interesting topic that is right in the sweet spot of interest for this community, it also appears scholarly, however the conclusions synthesized by the author strike me as naive and I suspect that’s also the conclusion of the majority. Whether it deserves an upvote is debateable. I downvoted.
I felt the confusion you are talking about. If readers could be expected to read the top-voted replies (RTFC), then the current distribution of votes would be ideal: The interesting article gets some well-deserved attention, and the skeptical replies give a counterbalance. But if readers don’t read the comments, then frankly I think this article got too many upvotes when compared to many others.
Offtopic: Is there a meta thread somewhere discussing the semantics of votes? I am happy that we don’t use slashdot’s baroque insightful/interesting/funny distinctions, but some consensus about the meaning of +1 would be nice.
I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
Karma-maximizing is often but not always a good approximation to worth-as-judged-by-community maximizing, which is a good thing to maximize.
Yes. The question is how significant the gap between “often” and “always” is.
Though if you have a target audience in mind, it is sometimes worth posting things that will be downvoted by the community-at-large.
(I’ve been doing this a lot recently, though I plan on cutting back and regaining some general rationalist credibility.)
The new meta-thread is due, feel free to make it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1w4/fall_2010_meta_thread/
The second reason is invalid unless the actor is self-deluding—a smart actor that faces being put out of work would silently adopt a SPR as his decision-making system without admitting to it. Since the superiority of SPR continues in many fields, either relevant actors are consistently not smart, performance is not a significant contributing criterion to their success, or they’re self-deluding ie. overrating their own judgment as the poster stated. [edit] I’d guess a combination of the last two.
Yes, I’d say it’s a combination of the last two points, with emphasis on the second last.
The critical question is whether maximizing the accuracy of your judgments is a practical way to get ahead in a given profession. Sometimes that is indeed the case, and in such fields we indeed see tremendous efforts to automate as much expert work as possible, often with great success, as in the electronics industry. But in professions that operate as more tightly-knit guilds, adherence to accepted standards is much more important than any objective metrics of effectiveness. Stepping outside of standard work procedures is often treated as a serious infraction with potentially severe consequences. (Especially if your non-standard methodology fails in some particular case, as it will sooner or later, and you can’t cover your ass by claiming that you followed all the standard accepted procedures and having your profession back you up organizationally.)
Now, you could try enhancing your work with decision models in secret. But even then, it’s hard to do it in a completely secretive way, and moreover, human minds being what they are, most people can achieve professional success only if they are really sincerely convinced in their expertise and effectiveness. Keeping a public facade is hard for everyone except a very small minority of people.
I am not sure what you think the answers to these questions are, but I would say my personal opinion on the matter is that the more ideologically charged and legally dangerous a matter is, the more important accuracy and correctness—at the expense, if necessary, of strongly-held beliefs. I would also say that protecting the reputation of competency enjoyed by high-status people is not an activity that strongly correlates with being right; I predict a small negative correlation, in fact.
Furthermore, there is a selection effect: learning the LW/OB folklore will result in you noticing specific cases of their application, and you are far, far more likely to write a post about that any about any given subject. That is, you see a prevalence of “standard bias explanation” because top-level posters are actively looking for actual cases of bias to discuss.