I agree strongly with everything in the above paragraph, especially the end. And so should you. Greens 4 life!
JJ10DMAN
Karma: 93
I don’t think most of us would agree that everyone out there is playing human rational capacity to the hilt and needs to slow down on attacking its biases and prejudices. After all, the modern critical examination of human biases, while touched upon throughout history, is essentially a century old or less.
The opposite is also true: a “negative halo effect” can be easily observed, wherein “bad” traits are also similarly grouped and feed on each other.
An interesting part of halo effects is that people seem to understand them on an instinctual level—not enough to get rid of them, but enough to exploit them...
I’ve drawn an extremely strong correlation in a particular online game between having a marijuana reference in one’s handle and being bad at the game; being bad is not strongly linked with marijuana references, but that’s only because they’re in the extreme minority of the population; if you’re sporting a “420”, you’re almost definitely underperforming. I’ve never bothered forming a hypothesis as to why this is, but it is.
So one day I decide to try a little experiment—for funsies, nothing rigorously scientific, just a “see what happens” thing—and predict aloud that an ally with a name referencing marijuana would perform poorly compared to the other players in the game. I turned out to be right (he was even worse than expected), but the interesting part was his response:
He implied my prediction was wrong, evidenced by that he was writing his college thesis on the effects of THC on the body.
The only way this statement makes sense is if we trace it through an expectation on his part that he can rebut the argument using the halo effect. “I am extremely accomplished academically,” I could almost read on the screen, “Therefore, I am not a poor performer in this online video game.”
On the contrary, I would argue that our default belief state is one full of scary monsters trying to kills us and whirling lights flying around overhead and oh no what this loud noise and why am I wet
...I can’t imagine a human ancestor in that kind of situation not coming up with some kind of desperate Pascal’s wager of, “I’ll do this ritualistic dance to the harvest goddess because it’s not really that much trouble to do in the grand scheme of things, and man if there’s any chance of improving the odds of a good harvest, I’m shakin’ my rain-maker.” Soon you can add, “and everyone else says it works” to the list, and bam, religion.
Yes! I can’t believe I don’t see this repeated in one form or another more often. Fallacies are a bit like prions in that they tend to force a cascade of fallacies to derive from them, and one of my favorite debate tactics is the thought experiment, “Let’s assume your entire premise is true. How might this contradict your position?”
Usually the list is longer than my own arguments.
Last November, Robin described a study where subjects were less overconfident if asked to predict their performance on tasks they will actually be expected to complete. He ended by noting that “It is almost as if we at some level realize that our overconfidence is unrealistic.”
I think there’s a less perplexing answer: that at some level we realize that our performance is not 100% reliable, and we should shift down our estimate by an intuitive standard deviation of sorts. That way, we can under-perform in this specific case, and won’t have to deal with the group dynamics of someone else’s horrible disappointment because they were counting on you doing your part as well as you said you could.
fixed:
Real tough-mindedness is saying, “Yes, sulfuric acid is a horrible painful death, but it ought to have happened to her because a world without consequence—without cause and effect—is meaningless to either idealize or pursue… and as far as we can peer into a hypothetical, objective, pragmatic view of what ought to be, she totally deserved it.”