Q: How can we effectively gather relevant evidence? A: I don’t know. (Controlled experiments? Asking people?)
Depends on the question. Lukeprog wrote a post about how to do scholarship, often self experimentation is a quick and easy way of getting data, and sometimes you can just asking someone or google it.
I should find that post by lukeprog, since it definitely sounds like the sort of thing I’m looking for here. My chain of questions can end either by saying “I don’t know”, or by linking to another post, and other reading material is obviously more useful than the phrase “I don’t know”.
Q: How can we successfully apply intuition? A: By repairing our biases, and developing habits that point us in the right direction under specific circumstances.
By trying to dodge biases, not confront them. If you realize that you dislike someone and that is affecting your judgement, the wrong way to go about it is to try to fudge factor it back like “I hate that bob is trying to convince me that X is small. I still think its big, but maybe I should subtract 50 because I’m biased”. The problem with this approach is that you cant reverse stupidity. The way you came up with the inital answer has to do with disliking a person, not the territory, so in order to have an accurate and narrow response your fudge factor would have to have to depend on reality anyway.
Its better to just let the “I hate bob. Screw that guy!” process run in the background and practice dissociating it from the decision mechanism, which is something completely different. Don’t even ask yourself what that part thinks.
I’m not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn’t reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.
So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be useful in certain circumstances. In particular, correcting the bias should be a useful method as long as two things are true: you understand the bias well enough to correct it successfully; and, once you’ve corrected the bias, you end up with a useful heuristic.
“I don’t like Bob, so things he says are probably wrong” is simply an example of a heuristic that, once de-biased, no longer says anything at all, and is thus useless.
I’m not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn’t reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.
So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be useful in certain circumstances. In particular, correcting the bias should be a useful method as long as two things are true: you understand the bias well enough to correct it successfully; and, once you’ve corrected the bias, you end up with a useful heuristic.
“I don’t like Bob, so things he says are probably wrong” is simply an example of a heuristic that, once de-biased, no longer says anything at all, and is thus useless.
I think we actually mostly agree. I’ll see if I can make my points clearer.
The first was that if you notice that what you’re actually doing is a lot like “Bob bad, so he wrong”, then the better solution is to cut that part of your thinking out and separate it from your decision making, not to try to keep it there but add a fudge factor so that the total algorithm has less of this bias.
The way you carved it, I would suggest “use ‘other’ heuristics” or correct the bias through excision not through addition of a cancelling bias. When I said “other heuristics” I would count it as a different heuristic if you took the same heuristic and excised the bias from it.
The second was that even if you could perfectly cancel it, you haven’t added any substance. You don’t want to congratulate yourself on canceling a bias and then fail to notice that you just hold maxent beliefs.
I should find that post by lukeprog, since it definitely sounds like the sort of thing I’m looking for here. My chain of questions can end either by saying “I don’t know”, or by linking to another post, and other reading material is obviously more useful than the phrase “I don’t know”.
I’m not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn’t reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.
So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be useful in certain circumstances. In particular, correcting the bias should be a useful method as long as two things are true: you understand the bias well enough to correct it successfully; and, once you’ve corrected the bias, you end up with a useful heuristic.
“I don’t like Bob, so things he says are probably wrong” is simply an example of a heuristic that, once de-biased, no longer says anything at all, and is thus useless.
I believe that the grandparent is referring to this one: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/
I think we actually mostly agree. I’ll see if I can make my points clearer.
The first was that if you notice that what you’re actually doing is a lot like “Bob bad, so he wrong”, then the better solution is to cut that part of your thinking out and separate it from your decision making, not to try to keep it there but add a fudge factor so that the total algorithm has less of this bias.
The way you carved it, I would suggest “use ‘other’ heuristics” or correct the bias through excision not through addition of a cancelling bias. When I said “other heuristics” I would count it as a different heuristic if you took the same heuristic and excised the bias from it.
The second was that even if you could perfectly cancel it, you haven’t added any substance. You don’t want to congratulate yourself on canceling a bias and then fail to notice that you just hold maxent beliefs.