cousin_it comments on Are these cognitive biases, biases? - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
In the first example,
Does that mean "roughly as much weight as a Bayesian calculation with a uniform prior would"? As if the subjects had never looked at other people before? Doesn't sound very encouraging.
The second example was a bit tricky for me to parse right now. The third one, however, stunned me. So the availability heuristic is a myth? Can our resident experts chime in now, please?
"Roughly the right amount of weight" may have been a miswording on my part - they didn't provide any calculation of what would have been the ideal Bayesian weight to put on your own opinion, as compared to the weight the participants put. However, there was a consensus effect, and the subjects were relatively accurate in predicting how others would behave. I do admit that my grasp of statistics isn't the strongest in the world, so I had to go by what the authors verbally reported.
As for the third study - well, it depends on how you interpret the availability heuristic. It is, AFAIK, true that e.g. biased reporting in the media will throw off people's conceptions of what events are the most likely. But one probably wouldn't be too far from the truth if they said that in that case, the brain is still computing relative frequencies correctly, given the information at hand - it's just that the media reporting is biased. The claim that there are some types of important information for which the mind has particular difficulty assessing relative frequencies correctly, though, doesn't seem to be as supported as is sometimes claimed.
No need to be scared of statistics! This part:
refers to the rule of succession.
Oh, I did get that part. The bit I didn't entirely follow when the authors had a longer discussion of different calculated phi values regarding the connection between the measured consensus effect and the participant's accuracy in the study. For one, I didn't recognize the term "phi" - Wikipedia implied that it might be the result of a chi-square test, which we did cover in the statistics 101 course I've taken, but it might have been too long ago as I'm not sure of how exactly that test applies in this case or how the phi value should be interpreted.