gwern comments on Never Leave Your Room - Less Wrong

66 Post author: Yvain 18 March 2009 12:30AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 18 March 2009 01:04:55AM 12 points [-]

Why do you expect the decision made in a default state to be more accurate than if it's modified by an unknown factor? If you don't expect to be primed in any particular direction, you may as well be swayed towards the right choice. Priming occurs even when you think of something yourself, so the advice could as well be extended to suggesting not to think about anything, especially about things relevant to the decision at hand, since those things are likely to influence the decision most. When any shadow can influence the outcome, your decision is probably no good to start with, and adding some unexpected noise won't hurt that much.

Comment author: gwern 18 March 2009 04:35:42PM 11 points [-]

Why do you expect the decision made in a default state to be more accurate than if it's modified by an unknown factor? If you don't expect to be primed in any particular direction, you may as well be swayed towards the right choice.

Besides Yvain's point about noise, I would point out that we live in a society that systematically seeks to distort our decisions toward non-optimal decisions. I refer to the >$150 billion advertising industry.

I certainly don't believe that a supermarket's many careful product placements and signs and illustrations are priming me to shop more rationally than I would without those stimuli.