Hey Less Wrong,
I'm currently taking a cognitive psychology class, and will be designing and conducting a research project in the field — and I'd like to do it on human judgment, specifically heuristics and biases. I'm currently doing preliminary research to come up with a more specific topic to base my project on, and I figured Less Wrong would be the place to come to find questions about flawed human judgment. So: any ideas?
(I'll probably be using these ideas mostly as guidelines for forming my research question, since I doubt it would be academically honest to take them outright. The study will probably take the form of a questionnaire or online survey, but experimental manipulation is certainly possible and it might be possible to make use of other psych department resources.)
Do you know of research supporting debiasing scope insensitivity by introducing differences in kind that approximately preserve the subjective quantitative relationship? If not I will look for it, but I don't want to if you already have it at hand.
I am thinking in particular of Project Steve. Rather than counter a list of many scientists who "Dissent from Darwinism" with a list of many scientists who believe evolution works, they made a list of hundreds of scientists named Steve who believe evolution works.
Many people is approximately equal to many people in the mind, be it hundreds or thousands, but many people is fewer than many Steves. That's the theory, anyway.
Intuitively it sounds like it should work, but I don't know if there are studies supporting this.
There's our solution to scope insensitivity about existential risks. "If unfriendly AI undergoes an intelligence explosion, millions of Steves will die. Won't somebody please think of the Steves?"