The single hardest bias to avoid is the bias blind spot, wherein people think (maybe not overtly, but on a gut level) that they are less biased than other people.
I’ve never found any studies, papers, web pages, anecdotes, or anything at all on how to fix it, so I don’t really know what to do about it. I have a conjecture, though, which intuitively appears that it might work (but take it cum grano salis):
To avoid bias blind spot, think “What biases are going into this decision?” every single time you make an important decision or come to an important conclusion. Then actually correct for them.
The problem with this is that people who currently take into account biases in their decisions (i.e. Less Wrong, and psychologists) end up not knowing how much their decisions are affected by the bias, and consequently they don’t know how much to adjust. So they don’t adjust at all. It ends up being an, “Okay, something’s wrong here, but I can’t fix it, so I’ll just do the same thing I was going to do before,” scenario.
The single hardest bias to avoid is the bias blind spot, wherein people think (maybe not overtly, but on a gut level) that they are less biased than other people.
Half actually are less biased than the median. Not bad considering how deluded some other biases make us!
Okay, lessdazed’s comment is getting up-voted a lot, which I think stems from how his post misinterprets mine in a humorous way.
less biased than other people.
was bad wording on my part, I’m afraid. What I really meant was:
significantly less biased than the norm.
which, in turn, really means:
less biased than they actually are.
This is what I really meant, and what the bias blind spot is really about: not noticing, or not correcting for, your own biases (which are there, regardless of whether they are there more or less often than other people. Remember: it is useless to be superior.)
The single hardest bias to avoid is the bias blind spot, wherein people think (maybe not overtly, but on a gut level) that they are less biased than other people.
I’ve never found any studies, papers, web pages, anecdotes, or anything at all on how to fix it, so I don’t really know what to do about it. I have a conjecture, though, which intuitively appears that it might work (but take it cum grano salis):
To avoid bias blind spot, think “What biases are going into this decision?” every single time you make an important decision or come to an important conclusion. Then actually correct for them.
The problem with this is that people who currently take into account biases in their decisions (i.e. Less Wrong, and psychologists) end up not knowing how much their decisions are affected by the bias, and consequently they don’t know how much to adjust. So they don’t adjust at all. It ends up being an, “Okay, something’s wrong here, but I can’t fix it, so I’ll just do the same thing I was going to do before,” scenario.
Half actually are less biased than the median. Not bad considering how deluded some other biases make us!
Did you know that 50% of our teachers are below average? This is unacceptable. We need to improve our education system!
Okay, lessdazed’s comment is getting up-voted a lot, which I think stems from how his post misinterprets mine in a humorous way.
was bad wording on my part, I’m afraid. What I really meant was:
which, in turn, really means:
This is what I really meant, and what the bias blind spot is really about: not noticing, or not correcting for, your own biases (which are there, regardless of whether they are there more or less often than other people. Remember: it is useless to be superior.)