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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, Oct. 26 - Nov. 01, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is having your attention grabbed by quarrels a bias? If it's not a bias, what is it?
It is a bias in your attention allocation system, which irrationally overestimates the value of thinking about quarrel-related issues.
I assume by "irrationally" you mean relative to the risk a quarrel posed in the ancestral environment? That would apply to all attention direction of modern humans. If so we should call this the modern society attention misapplication bias.
Sure, we're biased in many ways, but we're especially biased about quarrels. A political argument in the EEA could be a matter of life or death; in the modern world it has almost no importance whatsoever.
What do you want to learn by deciding whether or not it is a bias?
I hear a lot about biases. I think being (over?) fascinated by quarrels is at least in the neighborhood of biases, but the typical bias is cognitive rather than related to which percepts get attention.
If being fascinated by quarrels is connotatively different from "bias", then I may need to take that into account when I'm talking about that fascination. It may open up the subject of perceptual biases.
I'm just reading Kuhn book an scientific progress. In it he gives the example that chemists had a different opinion on the question whether a helium atom is a molecule than physicists.
The answer to such as "Is a A a B" can tell you often more about the person you are talking with than it tells you about the A and B. When looking at the notion of biases of Kahnemann I don't think that "having your attention grabbed by quarrels" is a cognitive bias.
I think these things are different. A bias is a persistent error in your estimates, you can treat it as a mistake in reasoning. Being fascinated by X is an attention allocation issue -- you may or may not think it's good to spend your attention this way, but there are no estimates and no mistakes in reasoning are necessarily involved.
I'd rather keep the definition of "bias" tight.
Everything everyone else said is right, but I do see this as being an edge case.
You (i.e. your System 1) anticipates some kind of excitement from reading or being involved in an online quarrel. I found myself drawn into one recently, and when I unpacked my feelings I realized a large component of my impulse originated in a desire to look smart. Of course, in the moment, you are feeling a strong and probably complex impulse, and don't have the time or inclination to name all the components of that compulsion.
To my mind, it does fall into the same family of cognitive glitches as biases, because it's a powerful, fast, automatic response which is usually wrong, i.e. usually just wastes your resources and leaves you feeling bad.
Only quarrels, or loud noises regardless of origin? I seem to remember that corpora quadrigemina already have a built-in eye-looks-towards-the-sound feature, so perhaps you should not treat it as a failed heuristic:)
I was thinking about online quarrels. It's not just that I notice this in myself, there are websites (or at least one) for people who want to know about other people's quarrels.
I've also noticed a preference in the news for reporting on people who disagree with each other. I think this goes beyond just wanting to show differing points of view.
Is the relevant word "drama"?
Probably. Some people prefer the more neutral term "conflict".
I think it is a bias only if it is present in most humans. I can't see that in me (but maybe I'm biased :-o). Can it be that you have developed a special interest or attention or curiosity in this? I mean some predisposition for being interested in social intercourse is surely normal (wouldn't call that a bias). If it gets reinforced you might develop that into an individual bias.
I think it's present in at least a fairly high proportion of humans.