I think you are right that there don’t have to be collisions (in practice) if the representation space is big enough and has sufficient high dimension.
On the other hand there is a metric aspect involved in the way the brain maps its data, which is not present in hash code (as far as I know). This reduces the effective dimension of the brain dramatically and I would guess that it is nowhere near 128 (as in your hash example) for the properties ‘good looking’, ‘honest’, etc.
It would be an interesting research project to find out.
I think that the cultural aspect you mention might play a significant role. As I wrote in another comment, my goal here was not to give a full explanation of the halo effect…
But I don’t think that your ‘beautiful women are stupid’ example undermines the general idea, since for those people ‘beauty’ doesn’t seem like a ‘positive’ concept and we wouldn’t expect it to correlate with intelligence therefore. But I am not defending the ‘halo effect’ anyway. I chose it as an example to highlight the main idea and I might as well have chosen another bias.
Well, the beauty is positive quality for men who believe prettier women are stupider. One need to be careful not to start redefining positive qualities as those that correlate positively with each other.
So what would be your other example of halo effect? USA tends to elect taller people for presidents, yet I don’t think many have trouble with concept that extreme tallness correlates negatively with health. I can’t really think of much halo effects, apart from other effects like e.g. if you pick someone based on one quality you rationalize other qualities as good, or if you are portraying other people you’ll portray those you dislike as all around negative and those you like as all around positive (which will bias anyone who’s relying on this to infer correlations).
I think the bigger issue is when we prepare problems for effective reasoning. Every number should be a statistical distribution of it’s possible values, yet it’s very unwieldy to compute and we assign a definite number, or normal distribution. That is usually harmless but can result in gross error. There’s whole spectra of colours, but nearby colours are confused, and there’s artificial gradation of colours into bins. That kind of thing.
So what would be your other example of halo effect?
I haven’t said that I have other examples of the halo effect, but examples of other biases which can also be explained by properties of how the brain processes sense inputs.
Ahh. Well i think you can explain a great deal of biases by the brain simply not being all that powerful and how it has to rely on various simple strategies rather than direct foresight and maximization of some foreseen quantity.
You can’t really expect a person who can’t do monty hall problem, to do proper probabilities—and that’s the majority of people—and then, you can’t expect a person who can do monty hall problem, not to pick up various cognitive and behavioural habits from those who can’t. Then, why people can’t do monty hall correctly, is it some universal failure in the brain organization? Well, smart individual would figure it out, most individuals can be taught methods for figuring it out.
I think you are right that there don’t have to be collisions (in practice) if the representation space is big enough and has sufficient high dimension. On the other hand there is a metric aspect involved in the way the brain maps its data, which is not present in hash code (as far as I know). This reduces the effective dimension of the brain dramatically and I would guess that it is nowhere near 128 (as in your hash example) for the properties ‘good looking’, ‘honest’, etc. It would be an interesting research project to find out.
I think that the cultural aspect you mention might play a significant role. As I wrote in another comment, my goal here was not to give a full explanation of the halo effect… But I don’t think that your ‘beautiful women are stupid’ example undermines the general idea, since for those people ‘beauty’ doesn’t seem like a ‘positive’ concept and we wouldn’t expect it to correlate with intelligence therefore. But I am not defending the ‘halo effect’ anyway. I chose it as an example to highlight the main idea and I might as well have chosen another bias.
Well, the beauty is positive quality for men who believe prettier women are stupider. One need to be careful not to start redefining positive qualities as those that correlate positively with each other.
So what would be your other example of halo effect? USA tends to elect taller people for presidents, yet I don’t think many have trouble with concept that extreme tallness correlates negatively with health. I can’t really think of much halo effects, apart from other effects like e.g. if you pick someone based on one quality you rationalize other qualities as good, or if you are portraying other people you’ll portray those you dislike as all around negative and those you like as all around positive (which will bias anyone who’s relying on this to infer correlations).
I think the bigger issue is when we prepare problems for effective reasoning. Every number should be a statistical distribution of it’s possible values, yet it’s very unwieldy to compute and we assign a definite number, or normal distribution. That is usually harmless but can result in gross error. There’s whole spectra of colours, but nearby colours are confused, and there’s artificial gradation of colours into bins. That kind of thing.
I haven’t said that I have other examples of the halo effect, but examples of other biases which can also be explained by properties of how the brain processes sense inputs.
Ahh. Well i think you can explain a great deal of biases by the brain simply not being all that powerful and how it has to rely on various simple strategies rather than direct foresight and maximization of some foreseen quantity.
You can’t really expect a person who can’t do monty hall problem, to do proper probabilities—and that’s the majority of people—and then, you can’t expect a person who can do monty hall problem, not to pick up various cognitive and behavioural habits from those who can’t. Then, why people can’t do monty hall correctly, is it some universal failure in the brain organization? Well, smart individual would figure it out, most individuals can be taught methods for figuring it out.