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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: David_Gerard 16 June 2014 01:12PM

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Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 16 June 2014 07:09:20PM 2 points [-]

Yes. Call it authority or dominance or whatever.

In all cases where significant loss can be avoided by backing down early this again is exploitable by e.g. boasting, aggression, rhetorics, intimidation.

The interesting sub-case here is that this can have side-effects where it is not actively exploited but accidentally - as the net effect is that the team reaches a sub-optimal joint result.

Kind of a cognitive bias more like over-confidence where lack of communication of confidence results.

Comment author: Lumifer 16 June 2014 07:20:38PM 1 point [-]

it is not actively exploited but accidentally - as the net effect is that the team reaches a sub-optimal joint result.

I don't know -- in more general terms Alice spent more resources (time, effort) at analyzing the problem and so feels more qualified than Bob who spent less resources. In this particular artificial setup this leads to suboptimal results, but I suspect that in most real-life situations, Alice would have better opinions/solutions/forecasts than Bob and so should have an advantage in a disagreement.

Comment author: gwillen 16 June 2014 08:03:29PM 3 points [-]

So I find that there's one place this frequently comes up detrimentally in real life: The advocate of something invariably has spent more time studying it than the opponent. This creates a (to my mind) unhealthy bias in some situations in the advocate's favor.