Overcoming bias

[ciphergoth]

http://www.overcomingbias.com/

This site is totally fascinating, and like TV Tropes and Wikipedia, it has that hyperlink-means-staying-forever power.

ETA: I'm going to start adding some especially cool entries here as I find them:

• Belief in belief
• Making beliefs pay rent
• Hindsight bias
• The proper use of doubt

ETA: I can't help but notice that all the essays that make me go "eee!" are by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who also describes the Twelve Virtues of Rationality. I think I have a new hero.

ETA: I'll probably link back to here in another post once I've added a few more links.

• Outside the laboratory
• Human evil and muddled thinking
• How to seem (and be) deep

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I can think of better ways of believing in the dragon, but then I'm quite good at that sort of thing...

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Me too, and I suspect a lot of trouble could be saved at the outset by asking the claimant what exactly he means by a dragon in this context. Relatedly, one of the problems with using dragons or unicorns as analogies for religious belief is that, although they are mythical, they predispose us to expect that the claimant is naming something he believes to have properties of the same kind as non-mythical animals, and religious believers are very rarely doing anything comparable.

Interesting site, though, and I will bookmark it.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

It turns out to be syndicated to LJ: over_bias_atom.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Stellar - thanks for finding this! *adds*

[djm4]

It strikes me that one of my problems with Dawkins is that he does the 'belief in belief' thing about religion. He believes he understands religion and religious people, and any attempt to get him to understand better is met with a flat 'don't need to, so shan't!' The preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion is, to my mind, a stream of replies to the arguments Dawkins believes people are making and really, really wants them to be making. And the replies are good ... in whatever parallel universe Dawkins is in where the invisible, intangible dragon is real. But the replies don't fit my experience of many of the religious, and of religion, nor do they fit many of the criticisms of Dawkins.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I completely disagree. Being someone who has direct experience of having been very religious and then, over a period of time, moving to being a very strong atheist, I happen to think Dawkins is completely justified in his approach.

[djm4]

Yes. As with the many other believers in my life who perceive things I don't, and don't perceive things I do, I've no idea if either of us is blind/hallucinating, or if the same things just look different wehn viewed by someone else. And without swapping brains, I suspect we've no way of knowing.

In other words, I don't know whether even to ask 'which of us is wrong?' is a meaningful question.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky does the Dawkins thing about religious belief, too, in that she clearly has only a very partial understanding of it or experience of people who have it. For instance, I have known many people who quite openly said that they did not believe but felt they ought to, or wanted to, or some such thing, and I find it quite patronising of her to assume that it's a rarity to be able to distinguish the two states of mind or that she (not being my mental health professional) knows better than I do what is going on in my mind. I have certainly been conscious in the past of believing things that I did not want to believe, and I am conscious now of wanting to believe several of the things that I do in fact believe. I think all the permutations of that one are quite possible. I can also think of numerous reasons why Jesuits would encourage their novices to doubt. Sheesh, atheism really needs some writers who evidence broader imaginations than those two do (and probably has them, yes, I ought to get round to reading some Sagan at some point).

More seriously, for someone with apparently quite a lot of philosophical training, I find it very odd that she doesn't consider the possibility that the issue between the dragon-claimant and the questioner is a semantic one. Most English-speakers with philosophical training will be familiar with Wittgenstein's view that all philosophical problems are artefacts of language, and while that may or may not be true, it's certainly true of a great many of them. Failing to examine that possibility seriously weakens her whole argument about anticipation; rather than doing "fast footwork", it may simply be that the dragon-claimant had never expected anyone to think dragons were physical and is rather bemused about how to respond to the questioner.

Yudkowsky does at least seem more interested in increasing her understanding than Dawkins does, though (although I note that one of her commenters hints at the semantic issue and does not get a reply).

[djm4]

I can't help but notice that all the essays that make me go "eee!" are by Eliezer Yudkowsky,

In which case, I trust you'll be resisting the Happy Death Spiral.

[juliet]

On the other hand, they are buying into evolutionary psychology rather more than is recommended.

Blindingly obvious flaw 1: it might be true (or at least defensible) to say that Thing X exists in modern beings because of Thing-X bearing ancestors. But it is *not* therefore true to say that Thing X confers reproductive fitness. It might be a side-effect of Thing Y that confers reproduction fitness. It might even be a *bad* side-effect of Thing Y, but +Y > -X so it doesn't matter.

Evolutionary psychology is *all* post-hoc; see above re belief and hindsight. There may be evidence for e.g. men tending to prefer women of particular sizes/shapes, but the "it's because of evolution" bit is entirely unproven. And probably unprovable. (And the research that's done on this often operates on some pretty dubious prior biases - in particular in terms of gender.)

Interesting stuff, though.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I share your suspicion of evolutionary psychology! I'm not sure she's making a very strong endorsement of it here, though - will have to read more thoroughly this lunchtime and see.

[juliet]

She makes the very good point early on that "angry ancestors have more kids" is not saying "being angry makes you want to reproduce", or anything of that sort. But then goes on to explicitly make the screwup mentioned above. And reports the "people having sex because of X Y & Z" story at the end without any kind of criticism or "this is a possibility" caveat. She does say that evolutionary psychology demands a great deal of separating of assorted not-necessarily-connected facts, but doesn't seem to actually be *applying* this.

Also, in that 12 virtues of rationality piece:

"It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. "

Now, even if psychology is a "science" at all (which I would at least contest), evolutionary psychology sure as hell isn't. And certainly not in the same league as heuristics/biases, probability theory, and decision theory.

Some of that - biases in particular - are a psychological issue, and *can* be studied in classic scientific manner, but you run into a lot of problems studying anything psychological in that fashion - hell of a lot of confounding variables, and the more you take out, the further you get from an actual-real-life situation. Observer/experimenter effect is a very real problem! (Not that this is always acknowledged, either.) But evolutionary psychology you really can't study like that *at all*.

If you're looking at psychological issues, there are a lot of problems with using quantitative scientific methods. Which isn't to say that they don't have their place; but one needs to be very cautious about drawing conclusions from that alone, and very aware of one's own biases and the biases implicit in the questions being asked. There's a *lot* of people doing research who aren't.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting indeed - I must ask you more about this next time we have a chance to have a natter, which should be soon.

What do you think about the study of evolutionary psychology of other animals? One big problem with trying to do it with humans is that you can't tell what's innate and what's cultural, but animals don't have nearly so much in the way of culture.

[juliet]

I am more than happy to talk about it at length, possibly at too much length ;-)

Animals: well, there may still be learnt vs innate issues, especially with social animals. (And it should be noted that I work on the assumption that animals do have some form of mental life and awareness.) The general point about how behaviours may not be "deliberately" selected for also still stands. I've read less animal evolutionary psych but the "observe behaviour X, make up evolutionary rationale Y, state Y as fact" approach still seems to be prevalent.

And of course animal experimentation suffers from very much the same problems as human experimentation, in that the more variables you control, the less normal the environment is and therefore the less typical the behaviour seen. For example, there's been experiments showing that rats have more neural connections and heavier brains when kept in cages with more stuff to do and with other rats to interact with. That's a normal situation for non-lab rats, but an abnormal one for lab rats. So the lab rats that have been being experimented on for the last howeverlong have all, basically, had abnormal rat-brains (& probably lacked in social knowledge). What does that imply for their behaviour, learning, & so on? (Also, I get very angry on behalf of the rats, but I am trying to ignore that bit for the purposes of the argument...)

[zbyszek.livejournal.com]

OK, that is proving to be quite adddictive.