when the stakes are high, it is not so much that people start thinking more accurately -- though this will happen to some extent, and for some people dramatically so
So this actually contradicts the paper that Eliezer cited, or at least seems to, yet it seems to ring true. Not only does the hypothesis that incentive reduces bias seem convincing to you and I, but it also forms a whole Chapter of Caplan's book "The Myth of the Rational Voter".
I think I'm going to split the prize between this comment and Eliezer Yudkowsky's one. Feel free to PM me and claim your prize.
Roko:
So this [that people become more cautious when the stakes are high] actually contradicts the paper that Eliezer cited, or at least seems to, yet it seems to ring true.
There is no contradiction. This paper shows that when stakes increase, people start thinking somewhat more accurately, but not drastically so -- which is exactly what I wrote above.
What these researchers did was not the sort of thing that triggers people's caution/normality/status-quo heuristics that I had in mind. They put people in a situation where they stood only to gain free mo...
I'm trying to better understand the relationship between incentivization and rationality, and it occurred to me that it is a "folk fact" around here that large financial incentives don't make cognitive biases go away.
However, I can't seem to find any papers that actually say this. It's not easy to google for (I have tried) so I wonder if the Less Wrong collective memory knows how to find the papers?
Is there a pattern to which biases go away with incentivization? Do we have at least 5 examples of biases that go away with incentivization and 5 examples that don't go away with incentivization?
As an incentive, I'll paypal $10 to the commenter whose answer is least biased and most useful.