Some expansion of point 4 If biases are so harmful, why don't they get selected out?
"During the last 25 years, researchers studying human reasoning and judgment in what has become known as the "heuristics and biases" tradition have produced an impressive body of experimental work which many have seen as having "bleak implications" for the rationality of ordinary people (Nisbett and Borgida 1975). According to one proponent of this view, when we reason about probability we fall victim to "inevitable illusions" (Piattelli-Palmarini 1994). Other proponents maintain that the human mind is prone to "systematic deviations from rationality" (Bazerman & Neale 1986) and is "not built to work by the rules of probability" (Gould 1992). It has even been suggested that human beings are "a species that is uniformly probability-blind" (Piattelli-Palmarini 1994). This provocative and pessimistic interpretation of the experimental findings has been challenged from many different directions over the years. One of the most recent and energetic of these challenges has come from the newly emerging field of evolutionary psychology, where it has been argued that it's singularly implausible to claim that our species would have evolved with no "instinct for probability" and, hence, be "blind to chance" (Pinker 1997, 351). Though evolutionary psychologists concede that it is possible to design experiments that "trick our probability calculators," they go on to claim that "when people are given information in a format that meshes with the way they naturally think about probability,"(Pinker 1997, 347, 351) the inevitable illusions turn out to be, to use Gerd Gigerenzer memorable term, "evitable" (Gigerenzer 1998). Indeed in many cases, evolutionary psychologists claim that the illusions simply "disappear" (Gigerenzer 1991)." http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/ArchiveFolder/Research%20Group/Publications/Wars/wars.html
Imagine someone finding out that "Physics professors fail on basic physics problems". This, of course, would never happen. To become a physicist in academia, one has to (among million other things) demonstrate proficiency on far harder problems than that.
Philosophy professors, however, are a different story. Cosmologist Sean Carroll tweeted a link to a paper from the Harvard Moral Psychology Research Lab, which found that professional moral philosophers are no less subject to the effects of framing and order of presentation on the Trolley Problem than non-philosophers. This seems as basic an error as, say, confusing energy with momentum, or mixing up units on a physics test.
Abstract:
We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.
Some quotes (emphasis mine):
When scenario pairs were presented in order AB, participants responded differently than when the same scenario pairs were presented in order BA, and the philosophers showed no less of a shift than did the comparison groups, across several types of scenario.
[...] we could find no level of philosophical expertise that reduced the size of the order effects or the framing effects on judgments of specific cases. Across the board, professional philosophers (94% with PhD’s) showed about the same size order and framing effects as similarly educated non-philosophers. Nor were order effects and framing effects reduced by assignment to a condition enforcing a delay before responding and encouraging participants to reflect on “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were order effects any smaller for the majority of philosopher participants reporting antecedent familiarity with the issues. Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting expertise on the very issues under investigation. Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting that before participating in our experiment they had stable views about the issues under investigation.
I am confused... I assumed that an expert in moral philosophy would not fall prey to the relevant biases so easily... What is going on?