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RichardKennaway comments on LW Women- Crowdsourced research on Cognitive biases and gender - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
About the xkcd comic: I am not actually convinced that IS how it works.
The actual evidence is that beliefs about group differences tend to be highly accurate and proportional, see http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/socialperception.html
How can something tend to be highly accurate?
ETA: Well, someone didn't like that, but didn't say why. Let me pose a more pointed question then. What distinction is being drawn between "tends to be highly accurate" and "is generally somewhat accurate"? If it takes me ten throws to score a treble 20 at the dartboard, am I "tending to be highly accurate"? If I score 70% in an exam, am I "tending to ace the exam"?
Perhaps the cited book answers this question. I have just checked it out from my library.
You're looking at the wrong problem and numbers.
If you score 70% in an exam, you are not very accurate.
If that was the only exam on which you scored 70%, and in all your other exams (of which there were more than ten) you had scores better than 95%, then you tend to be highly accurate, even though on that exam you were not accurate.
In other words, the claim by kaetl is that on average, some particular belief about group difference will probably be very accurate, because most of them are, but there are some that are not accurate at all. Which is why they tend to be highly accurate, but they're not always highly accurate (or even accurate at all).
Pedantry:
You mean "exam" here, I think.
You're right though.
Oh, yeah. Thanks for the heads-up! (edited grandparent)
I'd be curious to see your thoughts on the book if you feel like posting them.
Let's say you have written 5 exams and I know the scores of 3 of them. 70% 75% 73%. If I want to describe your performance I makes sense to say: "You tend to score between 70%-75% on exams.
Whenever you draw conclusions from cognitive science experiments to reality it's useful to use language that doesn't signal that you are 100% certain even if the experiments found highly accurate results, meaning they had very low p values,
So should one say, not "tend to be highly accurate", but "probably tend to be highly accurate"? Or "may probably tend to be highly accurate"?
At some point you have to stop nesting dubifiers, and I think the right point is at the outset: one is enough.
Given that people are in generally massively overconfident in the conclusions that they draw, I advocate to use more dubifiers rather than less.