I might be 12 years late, but I am only now reading Rationality and taking the time to properly address these issues.
What I have really found to be missing is the reason why availability is, in most cases, a bias; why generalizing a limited set of personal-experiences and memories is statistically wrong.
That reason, of course, lays in the fact that the available examples we rely on when this heuristic comes into play does not form a valid statistical sample. Nor in sample size (we would need dozens, if not hundreds of examples to reach proper confidence level and intervals, where we usually rely on only few [<10].) and nor in sampling frame (our observations are highly subjective and do not equally cover all sub-populations; in fact, they most-likely only cover a very specific subset of the population that revolves around our neighborhood and social-group.)
Additionally, I found an action-plan to fighting this missing (both here and in “we change our minds less often than we think”.) My personal advice is to use our motivation to combat it in the following way: notice whenever we form a belief and ask ourselves: am I generalizing a limited-set of examples that come into mind from memories and past experiences? am I falling to the availability heuristic?
When you catch yourself, like I now do daily, rate how important the conclusion is, and if so—avoid reaching it through this heuristic (and choose deliberate, rational analysis instead.) If not, you may reach it using this generalization as long as you label that belief as non-trustworthy.
I believe that labeling your beliefs with trust-levels could be a very productive approach; when, in the future, you rely on a previous belief, you can incorporate the trust-level you have in that belief into play and consider if you may or may not trust it towards your current goal.
I would love to hear from you guys about all of this. For more, you can read what I’ve written in my Psychology OneNote notebook, in the page about this very bias.
I might be 12 years late, but I am only now reading Rationality and taking the time to properly address these issues.
What I have really found to be missing is the reason why availability is, in most cases, a bias; why generalizing a limited set of personal-experiences and memories is statistically wrong.
That reason, of course, lays in the fact that the available examples we rely on when this heuristic comes into play does not form a valid statistical sample. Nor in sample size (we would need dozens, if not hundreds of examples to reach proper confidence level and intervals, where we usually rely on only few [<10].) and nor in sampling frame (our observations are highly subjective and do not equally cover all sub-populations; in fact, they most-likely only cover a very specific subset of the population that revolves around our neighborhood and social-group.)
Additionally, I found an action-plan to fighting this missing (both here and in “we change our minds less often than we think”.) My personal advice is to use our motivation to combat it in the following way: notice whenever we form a belief and ask ourselves: am I generalizing a limited-set of examples that come into mind from memories and past experiences? am I falling to the availability heuristic?
When you catch yourself, like I now do daily, rate how important the conclusion is, and if so—avoid reaching it through this heuristic (and choose deliberate, rational analysis instead.) If not, you may reach it using this generalization as long as you label that belief as non-trustworthy.
I believe that labeling your beliefs with trust-levels could be a very productive approach; when, in the future, you rely on a previous belief, you can incorporate the trust-level you have in that belief into play and consider if you may or may not trust it towards your current goal.
I would love to hear from you guys about all of this. For more, you can read what I’ve written in my Psychology OneNote notebook, in the page about this very bias.