Viliam_Bur comments on [Link] FreakoStats and CEV - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
My guess would be reversing stupidity, and searching for a difficult solution when a simple one exists. Both are related to signalling intelligence. On the other hand, I guess many intelligent people don't self-diagnose as intelligent, so perhaps those biases would be only strong in Mensa and similar places.
But I was more thinking about one bias appearing stronger when a bias in another direction is eliminated. For example bias X makes people think A, bias Y makes people think B, if a person is under influence of both biases, the answer is randomly A or B. In such case, eliminating bias X leads to increase of answer B.
Depending on what certainty of answer is required. Before convincing people "you should believe X, because this is what smart people believe" I would like to be at least 95% certain, because this kind of argument is rather offensive towards opponents.
Biases don't have clear 'directions' often. If you are overconfident on a claim P, that's just as accurate as saying you were underconfident on claim ~P. Similarly for anchoring or priming - if you anchor on the random number generator while estimating number of African nations, whether you look "over" or "under" is going to depend on whether the RNG was spitting out 1-50 or 100-200, perhaps.
And what does that mean? If you just want to know 'what do smart people in general believe versus normal people', you don't need large samples if you can get a random selection and your questions are each independent. For example, in my recent Wikipedia experiment I removed only 100 links and 3 were reverted; when I put that into a calculator for a Bernouilli distribution, I get 99% certainty that the true reversion rate is 0-7%. So to simplify considerably, if you sampled 100 smart people and 100 dumb people and they differ by 14%, is that enough certainty for you?
I am not good at statistics, but I guess yes. Especially if those 100 people are really randomly selected, which in the given situation they were.