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NancyLebovitz comments on In Defense of the Fundamental Attribution Error - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think you need to hold fundamental attribution lightly, especially when you have a small sample.
If someone posts a badly thought out article, all you can be sure of is that they don't have reliable inhibitions against posting bad articles. If you see two or three in a row, you can make a stronger judgement of what their writing is likely to be like.
A problem with fundamental attribution is that once you've made a judgment about someone, you're at risk of looking for evidence that you're right. (Sorry, no cite, but this process is blatantly present once someone likes or hates a politician.)
It can be hard to know whether you have a good enough sample-- I'd been assuming that some store staff people were temperamentally grumpy, but the true situation was that I was shopping late in the day. They're much more cheerful if I show up early.
This confuses me. What's the difference between grumpiness and what you updated to after showing up earlier?
I know somebody who is -always-, for lack of a better word, grumpy - what I think you refer to as "temperamentally grumpy". Grumpy doesn't really describe that, though. My internal representation for "grumpiness" as a description of a person isn't "Always a grouch", it's a heavier weight on the rate at which people get grumpy. Same with anger.