AnnaSalamon comments on Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy - Less Wrong

82 Post author: AnnaSalamon 29 October 2010 12:00AM

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Comment author: HughRistik 03 November 2010 12:57:45AM 3 points [-]

The problem with the most poignant examples is that it's impossible to find beliefs that signal low status and/or disreputability in the modern mainstream society, and are also uncontroversially true.

This is a good point. Most ideas that are mistreated by modern mainstream society are not obviously true. Rather, they are treated as much less probable than a less-biased assessment would estimate. This tendency leads to many ideas being given a probability of 0%, when they really deserve a probability of 40-60% based on the current evidence. This is consistent with your experience (and mine) of examining various controversies and being unable to tell which positions are actually correct, based on the current evidence.

The psychology seems to combine a binary view of truth combined with raising the burden of proof for low status beliefs: people are allowed to "round-down" or even floor their subjective probabilities for undesirable beliefs. Any probability less than 50% (or 90%, in some discussions) can be treated the same.

Unfortunately, the English language (and probably others, too) is horribly bad for communication about probability, allowing such sorts of forms of sophistry to flourish. And the real world is often insufficient to punish educated middle-class people for rounding or flooring the probabilities in the socially desirable direction, even though people making such abuses of probability would get destroyed in many practical endeavours (e.g. betting).

One method for avoiding bias is to identify when one is tempted to engage in such rounding and flooring of probabilities.