The New Yorker article on cognitive biases

BlazeOrangeDeer

A New Yorker article on cognitive biases was on the reddit front page in the last day. It seems like a good opportunity to discuss what the article got right, what it didn't, how reddit reacted, and how one might better publicize the topic in the future.

reddit comments(this link doesn't work any more, see VincentYu's comment for links)

article

reddit comments(this link doesn't work any more, see VincentYu's comment for links)

article

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.

1fubarobfusco14y

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.

4gwern14y

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.)

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The New Yorker article on cognitive biases

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The New Yorker article on cognitive biases

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