asr comments on PSA: Learn to code - Less Wrong

34 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 25 May 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: asr 29 May 2012 06:23:57PM 1 point [-]

I'd like to see evidence that the observed correlation between flawed thinking and biases is due to "flawed thinking is easily affected by biases" rather than "biases cause flawed thinking".

If I understand right, the point was this: programmers routinely display flawed thinking (in the form of conceptual bugs) that don't seem to stem from cognitive biases. This evidence, if you haven't previously internalized it, should cause you to downwards-revise your estimate for the fraction of flawed thinking caused by biases.

Comment author: thomblake 29 May 2012 06:27:30PM 0 points [-]

programmers routinely display flawed thinking (in the form of conceptual bugs) that don't seem to stem from cognitive biases.

Can you give an example?

Comment author: asr 31 May 2012 08:15:26AM 1 point [-]

Sure. A common source of bugs is that different developers or other stakeholders have different expectations. I say "this variable is height in feet", and you assume it's meters. I forget to synchronize access to a piece of state accessed from multiple threads. I get over-cautious and add too much synchronization, leading to deadlock. I forget to handle the case where a variable is null.

None of those feel like cognitive biases, all are either common or infamous bugs.

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