khafra comments on The New Yorker article on cognitive biases - Less Wrong
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I'm missing something basic, here: If cognitive sophistication does attenuate other biases, how can they tell that the cognitively sophisticated believe themselves less biased than the average person to the point of being biased in that belief, rather than merely to the point of being correct?
VincentYu has it right. They 1) used biases that had previously been shown to be uncorrelated with intelligence and 2) checked and confirmed that the biases actually were uncorrelated with intelligence in their sample.
Having read the paper, I don't think they can, and they admit this to some extent. What they can prove is that in the small selected set of biases they chose, the smart are incorrect; but to show that the smart are miscalibrated in general about their resistance to biases, one would need to do a lot more work. (There are scores of biases, after all.)
They studied the bias blind spots of cognitive biases that show no correlation with cognitive ability.
ETA: On further thought, the lack of correlation merely simplifies the study, and is not a necessary assumption – for each subject, they administered tests on the selected cognitive biases, obtained several measures of cognitive ability/sophistication (CRT, SAT, etc.), and asked for subjective assessments on the extent of the biases:
They used the subjective assessments along with the results of the administered tests to derive the extent of bias blind spots, independent of the measures of cognitive ability. These are then combined in a standard correlation study, and your hypothesis can be tested.
If that were true, and if the relation between measures of "cognitive sophistication" and of bias were continuous, then by the intermediate value theorem there would be some level of "cognitive sophistication" which minimized overall bias. Of course, that might be an unstable point; anyone smarter than that tends to fall into a bias-blind-spot attractor and anyone less smart than that tends to fall into an object-level bias attractor.