Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 October 2007 06:14PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 October 2007 04:06:50PM 5 points [-]

It is nice to have a clear example of where people are consistently underconfident. Are there others?

People tend to take into account the magnitude of evidence (how extreme is the value?) while ignoring its reliability, and they also tend to be bad at combining multiple pieces of evidence. So another good way to generate underconfidence is to give people lots of small pieces of reliable evidence. (I believe it's in the same paper, "The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence".)