So apparently the fundamental attribution bias may not really exist: "The actor-observer asymmetry in attribution: a (surprising) meta-analysis"_ActObs_meta.pdf), Malle 2006. Nor has Thinking, Fast and Slow held up too well under replication or evaluation (maybe half): https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/
I am really discouraged about how the heuristics & biases literature has held up since ~2008. I wasn't naive enough back then to think that all the results were true, I knew about things like publication bias and a bit about power and p-hacking, but what has happened since has far exceeded my worst expectations. (I think Carl Shulman or someone warned me that the H&B literature wouldn't, so props to whoever that was.) At this point, it seems like if it was written about in Cialdini's Influence, you can safely assume it's not real.
At this point, it seems like if it was written about in Cialdini's Influence, you can safely assume it's not real.
How well has the ideas presented in Cialdini's book held up? Scarcity heuristic, Physical attractiveness stereotype, and Reciprocity I thought were pretty solid and hasn't come under scrutiny, yet at least.
Time-reversal heuristic: if the failed replication had come first, why would you privilege the original over that? If the replications cannot be trusted, despite the benefit of clear hypotheses to test and almost always higher power & incorporation of heterogeneity, a fortiori, the original cannot be trusted either...
I moved the Rational Politics Project to Gleb's drafts because the discussion seemed insufficiently good.
Elo requested that I post this comment about spamming from (I take it) Landmark Forum participants in "the next Open Thread". (Perhaps in order to remind him to perform some sort of moderator-hammering on them.) So here we are. (Linking to it seemed like a better idea than copying its text.)
I don't know what to think about Ego Depletion. When I first read about it, it felt quite intuitive and the research on it was robust. It came up everywhere I read. Then the whole replication crisis thing happened and serious doubts were cast on it. I updated towards a weaker effect.
I haven't given it much thought since, until I was recently reminded of the study about mental fatigue on parole board judges and how chances of granting parole were greatest at the beginning of the work day and right after a food break(replenish mental resources).
If Ego...
PSA: There currently isn't a way to edit the URL of a linkpost. (Be careful when submitting one!) If you get it wrong, resubmit with the right link and get a mod to delete the incorrect post.
Another math problem. Enjoy it!
https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/yet-another-math-problem/
I have the same question as this OP. I didn't think any of the answers were helpful enough. Basically everything I could find regarding Assange's asylum with Ecuador stems from the threat of Sweden extraditing him to the U.S., however the threat of politically motivated deportation remains regardless of what happens in Sweden; the U.K. can just as well do it.
Are people here is interested in having a universal language, and have strong opinions on esperanto?
I know we had some discussion of "real names" here a few weeks ago, here is an overview of the recent, relevant study on that, by the Coral Project.
"People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions?
Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve ...
Has anyone 'clicked' yet? Read it through as an exercise to do, it's too long to paste here.
Question: Regardless of the degree to which this is true, if everyone collectively assumed that Valence Utilitarianism (every conscious experience has value (positive or negative, depending on pleasantness/unpleasantness), each action's utility is the sum of all value it causes / changes / prevents) was universally true, how much would that change about Friendly AI research?
I think there are some serious issues with the methodology and instruments used to measure heuristics & biases, which they didn't fully understand even ten years ago.
Some cognitive biases are robust and well established, like the endowment effect. Then there are the weirder ones, like ego depletion. I think a fundamental challenge with biases is clever researchers first notice them by observing other humans, as well as observing the way that they think, and then they need to try and measure it formally. The endowment effect, or priming, maps pretty well to a lab. On the other hand, ego depletion is hard to measure in a lab (in any sufficiently extendable way).
I think a lot of people experience, or think they experience, something like ego depletion. Maybe it's insufficiently described, or a broad classification, or too hard to pin down. So the original researcher noticed it in their experience, and formed a contrived experiment to 'prove' it. Everyone agreed with it, not because the statistics were compelling or it was a great research design, but because they all experience, or think they experience, ego depletion.
Then someone replicates it, and it doesn't replicate, because it's really hard to measure robustly. I think ego depletion doesn't work well in a lab, or without some sort of control or intervention, but those are hard things to set up for such a broad and expansive argument. And I guess you could build a survey, but that sucks too.
In the fundamental attribution error, I think that meta analysis is great, in that it shows that these studies suck statistically. They only work if you come to them with the strong prior evidence that "Hey, this seems like something I do to other people, and in the fake examples of attribution error I can think of lots of scenarios where I have done that." Of course, our memory sucks, so that is a questionable prior, but how questionable is it? In the end I don't know if it's real, or only real for some people, or too generalized to be meaningful, or true in some situations but not others, or how other people's brains work. Probably the original thesis was too nice and tidy: Here is a bias, here is the effect size. Maybe the reality is: Here is a name for a ton of strange correlated tiny biases, which together we classify as 'fundamental attribution', but which is incredibly challenging to measure statistically over a sample population in a contrived setting, as the best information to support it seems inextricably tangled up in the recesses of our brains.
(also most heuristics and biases probably do suck, and lack of replication shows the authors were charlatans)
The endowment effect, or priming, maps pretty well to a lab.
Are you saying that cognitive biases like endowment effect and priming map better to lab settings therefore are less susceptible to contrived experiments to prove them like ego depletion?
I don't know whether or not these map well to a lab or not, but priming research is one of the major areas under going a replication crisis; not sure about the endowment effect.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
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