MarsColony_in10years comments on Hindsight Devalues Science - Less Wrong

92 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 August 2007 07:39PM

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Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 21 February 2015 05:41:41AM 0 points [-]

First time around (with hindsight bias) I answered F, T, F?, T, T

Second time around (without hindsight bias) I answered F, T, T?, T, F

  1. Educated people are more likely to agree with authority, because they have spent more time being conditioned to obey teachers. I generalized that they might also take orders easier in the military, and conform to the circumstances easier, despite "rough and tumbled" blue collar stereotypes.

  2. I thought be difficult to measure, but that there would be some small but probably measurable advantage.

  3. I couldn't really tell. At first my guess was based on the idea that repressed people are more motivated and fight harder. When I reversed my decision, it was because I put a higher weight on the situation being similar to women in business, where men are more likely to rock the boat and ask for a higher salary or promotions than women are. In retrospect, both of these are attempts to confirm a hypothesis, rather than to disprove it.

  4. People often favor members of their own group. Unless a majority of southern blacks dislike a majority of southern whites, rather than just being indifferent, I hypothesized that they would relate to them more easily as fellow southerners.

  5. Initially, I presumed what I thought was the simple and obvious answer, that people would avoid stress. After that, I recalled that adrenalin, deep bonds of sharing an experience, and a sense of purpose are play a big part, and that boredom may actually be a bigger factor since soldiers wouldn't want to abandon their countrymen.

It's hard to describe the different sensations of the two thought processes. I think it was harder to put in as much effort when I was actively suspending my disbelief. I was just going through the motions. The second time, I was really unsure, and took a deeper look. Or maybe I would have taken a deeper look if I had reexamined it under some other pretense.

I wasn't sure whether the recession statement was true. I believe it is, but I'm not sure it would be for a full scale depression, since if people are earning less then they won't be able to be more thrifty, because they will always need to eat and afford the basic necessities.