I feel confused; you quote Pearl talking about how hard this is for people to accept etc., but it feels to me like people generally get this intuitively in the kinds of contexts where it naturally pops up? There are some instances like Monty Hall where people do get really confused, but Monty Hall is notable for being a really weird and unnatural setup. Whereas if you have a sore throat and then find out that you have the flu, then it seems to me that most people will naturally think “ah I don’t have mono then”, wouldn’t they? (And given that it’s Alex who’s doing the selecting of who qualifies, I would expect them to be quite aware of the fact that they are sometimes making the choice to date a rude man because man that guy is hot, or vice versa.)
It does seem to me that there’s sometimes a bias in people conditioning on Z too much; e.g. if we use this example
Judea Pearl gives an example of reasoning about a burglar alarm: if your neighbor calls you at your dayjob to tell you that your burglar alarm went off, it could be because of a burglary, or it could have been a false-positive due to a small earthquake. There could have been both an earthquake and a burglary, but if you get news of an earthquake, you’ll stop worrying so much that your stuff got stolen, because the earthquake alone was sufficient to explain the alarm.
then local burglars can exploit that by hitting homes right at the time of an earthquake, because people will assume the alarms to be caused by the earthquake rather than a genuine burglary.
Prejudice may be another example of conditioning on Z too much; if you are predisposed to believe that group membership → Z, then you may jump to the conclusion that Z is caused by group membership, while neglecting other causes.
But this seems like the opposite of the bias you are talking about?
I agree that people can reason about the mono case. I’m not convinced this isn’t hard in general. Most examples of collider bias struck me as unintuitive, and it seems very unlikely that I’m worse than average at causal reasoning.
(And given that it’s Alex who’s doing the selecting of who qualifies, I would expect them to be quite aware of the fact that they are sometimes making the choice to date a rude man because man that guy is hot, or vice versa.)
Noticing that the guy is hot is way different from taking the further step to explain the correlation in her dating pool. If this is generally correctly reasoned out, then why haven’t I ever heard someone answer the complaints of “women like bad boys” by (informally) explaining collider bias?
Most examples of collider bias struck me as unintuitive, and it seems very unlikely that I’m worse than average at causal reasoning.
Is that because they are intrinsically unintuitive, or because they are expressed in an unfamiliar way? I would guess that if one starts by explaining the mono case, then points out how it is analogous to the formal structure (the way Zack did and your quoted Wikipedia example did), then it would be relatively easily for people to get. Whereas if there’s an explanation that e.g. starts off from a very mathematical and formal presentation, then it’s harder to connect with what you already know intuitively.
then why haven’t I ever heard someone answer the complaints of “women like bad boys” by (informally) explaining collider bias?
Is that an example of collider bias? If it were, then one would expect to also hear similar complaints about women’s (or for that matter men’s) preference for many other traits that are perceived negatively, e.g. “women like guys without money” or “men like unattractive women”. The fact that it’s “bad boys” that gets singled out in particular suggests that there is actually something special about that trait, and the standard explanations (e.g. that confidence is attractive and that badness correlates with confidence) seem reasonable to me.
I feel confused; you quote Pearl talking about how hard this is for people to accept etc., but it feels to me like people generally get this intuitively in the kinds of contexts where it naturally pops up? There are some instances like Monty Hall where people do get really confused, but Monty Hall is notable for being a really weird and unnatural setup. Whereas if you have a sore throat and then find out that you have the flu, then it seems to me that most people will naturally think “ah I don’t have mono then”, wouldn’t they? (And given that it’s Alex who’s doing the selecting of who qualifies, I would expect them to be quite aware of the fact that they are sometimes making the choice to date a rude man because man that guy is hot, or vice versa.)
It does seem to me that there’s sometimes a bias in people conditioning on Z too much; e.g. if we use this example
then local burglars can exploit that by hitting homes right at the time of an earthquake, because people will assume the alarms to be caused by the earthquake rather than a genuine burglary.
Prejudice may be another example of conditioning on Z too much; if you are predisposed to believe that group membership → Z, then you may jump to the conclusion that Z is caused by group membership, while neglecting other causes.
But this seems like the opposite of the bias you are talking about?
I agree that people can reason about the mono case. I’m not convinced this isn’t hard in general. Most examples of collider bias struck me as unintuitive, and it seems very unlikely that I’m worse than average at causal reasoning.
Noticing that the guy is hot is way different from taking the further step to explain the correlation in her dating pool. If this is generally correctly reasoned out, then why haven’t I ever heard someone answer the complaints of “women like bad boys” by (informally) explaining collider bias?
Is that because they are intrinsically unintuitive, or because they are expressed in an unfamiliar way? I would guess that if one starts by explaining the mono case, then points out how it is analogous to the formal structure (the way Zack did and your quoted Wikipedia example did), then it would be relatively easily for people to get. Whereas if there’s an explanation that e.g. starts off from a very mathematical and formal presentation, then it’s harder to connect with what you already know intuitively.
Is that an example of collider bias? If it were, then one would expect to also hear similar complaints about women’s (or for that matter men’s) preference for many other traits that are perceived negatively, e.g. “women like guys without money” or “men like unattractive women”. The fact that it’s “bad boys” that gets singled out in particular suggests that there is actually something special about that trait, and the standard explanations (e.g. that confidence is attractive and that badness correlates with confidence) seem reasonable to me.