Related to Information Cascades

Information Cascades has implied that people's votes are being biased by the number of votes already cast.  Similarly, some commenters express a perception that higher status posters are being upvoted too much.

If, like me, you suspect that you might be prone to these biases, you can correct for them by installing LessWrong anti-kibitzer which I hacked together yesterday morning.  You will need Firefox with the greasemonkey extention installed.  Once you have greasemonkey installed, clicking on the link to the script will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to enable the script.  Once you enable it, a button which you can use to toggle the visibility of author and point count information should appear in the upper right corner of any page on LessWrong.  (On any page you load, the authors and pointcounts are automatically hidden until you show them.)  Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you.

Already, I've had some interesting experiences.  There were a few comments that I thought were written by Eliezer that turned out not to be (though perhaps people are copying his writing style.)  There were also comments that I thought contained good arguments which were written by people I was apparently too quick to dismiss as trolls.  What are your experiences?

Related to: Comments on Degrees of Radical Honesty, OB: Belief in Belief, Cached Thoughts.

"Nothing worse could happen to these labours than that anyone should make the unexpected discovery that there neither is, nor can be, any a priori knowledge at all.... This would be the same thing as if one sought to prove by reason that there is no reason" (Critique of Practical Reason, Introduction).

You don't need Kant to demonstrate the value of honesty. In fact, summoning his revenant can be a dangerous thing to do. You end up in the somewhat undesirable situation of having almost the right conclusion, but having it for the wrong reasons. Reasons you weren't even aware of, because they were all collapsed into the belief, "I believe in person X".

One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don't die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it's very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right.

Since the community doesn't value relinquishment, the cost of writing a flawed criticism is very low. Therefore, journals are glutted with so-called "negative results": "Kant was wrong", "Hegel was wrong", etc. No one seriously believes otherwise, but writing positive philosophical results is hard, and not writing at all isn't a viable career option for a professional philosopher.

To its credit, MBlume refrains from bringing up Kant in his article on radical honesty, where he cites other, more feasible variants of radical honesty. However, in the comments, Kant rears his ugly head.

Rationalism is most often characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate rather than adventitious, (3) an emphasis on certain rather than merely probable knowledge as the goal of enquiry. -- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Continental Rationalism.

By now, there are some things which most Less Wrong readers will agree on. One of them is that beliefs must be fueled by evidence gathered from the environment. A belief must correlate with reality, and an important part of that is whether or not it can be tested - if a belief produces no anticipation of experience, it is nearly worthless. We can never try to confirm a theory, only test it.

But yet, we seem to have no problem coming up with theories that are either untestable or that we have no intention of testing, such as evolutionary psychological explanations for the underdog effect.

I'm being a bit unfair here. Those posts were well thought out and reasonably argued, and Roko's post actually made testable predictions. Yvain even made a good try at solving the puzzle, and when he couldn't, he reasonably concluded that he was stumped and asked for help. That sounds like a proper use of humility to me.

But the way that ev-psych explanations get rapidly manufactured and carelessly flung around on OB and LW has always been a bit of a pet peeve for me, as that's exactly how bad evpsych gets done. The best evolutionary psychology takes biological and evolutionary facts, applies those to humans and then makes testable predictions, which it goes on to verify. It doesn't take existing behaviors and then try to come up with some nice-sounding rationalization for them, blind to whether or not the rationalization can be tested. Not every behavior needs to have an evolutionary explanation - it could have evolved via genetic drift, or be a pure side-effect from some actual adaptation. If we set out by trying to find an evolutionary reason for some behavior, we are assuming from the start that there must be one, when it isn't a given that there is. And even a good theory need not explain every observation.

Related: The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy, The Fallacy Fallacy

Inspired by:

We need a catchy name for the fallacy of being over-eager to accuse people of fallacies that you have catchy names for.

 

When you read an argument you don't like, but don't know how to attack on its merits, there is a trick you can turn to. Just say it commits¹ some fallacy, preferably one with a clever name. Others will side with you, not wanting to associate themselves with a fallacy. Don't bother to explain how the fallacy applies, just provide a link to an article about it, and let stand the implication that people should be able to figure it out from the link. It's not like anyone would want to expose their ignorance by asking for an actual explanation.

What a horrible state of affairs I have described in the last paragraph. It seems, if we follow that advice, that every fallacy we even know the name of makes us stupider. So, I present a fallacy name that I hope will exactly counterbalance the effects I described. If you are worried that you might defend an argument that has been accused of committing some fallacy, you should be equally worried that you might support an accusation that commits the Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy. Well, now that you have that problem either way, you might as well try to figure if the argument did indeed commit the fallacy, by examining the actual details of the fallacy and whether they actually describe the argument.

But, what is the essence of this Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy? The problem is not the accusation of committing a fallacy itself, but that the accusation is vague. The essence is "Don't bother to explain". The way to avoid this problem is to entangle your counterargument, whether it makes a fallacy accusation or not, with the argument you intend to refute. Your counterargument should distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, in that it specifies criteria that systematically apply to a class of bad arguments but not to good arguments. And those criteria should be matched up with details of the allegedly bad argument.

The wrong way:

It seems that you've committed the Confirmation Bias.

The right way:

The Confirmation Bias is when you find only confirming evidence because you only look for confirming evidence. You looked only for confirming evidence by asking people for stories of their success with Technique X.

Notice how the right way would seem very out of place when applied against an argument it does not fit. This is what I mean when I say the counterargument should distinguish the allegedly bad argument from good arguments.

And, if someone commits the Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy in trying to refute your arguments, or even someone else's, call them on it. But don't just link here, you wouldn't want to commit the Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy Fallacy. Ask them how their counterargument distinguishes the allegedly bad argument from arguments that don't have the problem.

 

¹ Of course, when I say that an argument commits a fallacy, I really mean that the person who made that argument, in doing so, committed the fallacy.

   Marge: You changed your name without consulting me?
   Homer: That's the way Max Power is, Marge.  Decisive.
      --The Simpsons

In honor of Will Powers and his theories about self-control, today I would like to talk about my favorite bias ever, the name letter effect. The name letter effect doesn't cause global existential risk or stock market crashes, and it's pretty far down on the list of things to compensate for. But it's a good example of just how insidious biases can be and of the egoism that permeates every level of the mind.

The name letter effect is your subconscious preference for things that sound like your own name. This might be expected to mostly apply to small choices like product brand names, but it's been observed in choices of spouse, city of residence, and even career. Some evidence comes from Pelham et al's Why Susie Sells Seashells By The Seashore:

The paper's first few studies investigate the relationship between a person's name and where they live. People named Phil were found more frequently than usual in Philadelphia, people named Jack in Jacksonville, people named George in Georgia, and so on with p < .001. To eliminate the possibility of the familiarity effect causing parents to subconsciously name their children after their place of residence, further studies were done with surnames and with people who moved later in life, both with the same results. The results held across US and Canadian city names as well as US state names, and were significant both for first name and surname.

In case that wasn't implausible enough, the researchers also looked at association between birth date and city of residence: that is, were people born on 2/02 more likely to live in the town of Two Harbors, and 3/03 babies more likely to live in Three Forks? With p = .003, yes, they are.

The researchers then moved on to career choices. They combed the records of the American Dental Association and the American Bar association looking for people named either Dennis, Denice, Dena, Denver, et cetera, or Lawrence, Larry, Laura, Lauren, et cetera. That is: were there more dentists named Dennis and lawyers named Lawrence than vice versa? Of the various statistical analyses they performed, most said yes, some at < .001 level. Other studies determined that there was a suspicious surplus of geologists named Geoffrey, and that hardware store owners were more likely to have names starting with 'H' compared to roofing store owners, who were more likely to have names starting with 'R'.

Some other miscellaneous findings: people are more likely to donate to Presidential candidates whose names begin with the same letter as their own, people are more likely to marry spouses whose names begin with the same letter as their own, that women are more likely to show name preference effects than men (but why?), and that batters with names beginning in 'K' are more likely than others to strike out (strikeouts being symbolized by a 'K' on the records).

If you have any doubts about the validity of the research, I urge you to read the linked paper. It's a great example of researchers who go above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate as many confounders as possible.

The name letter effect is a great addition to any list of psychological curiosities, but it does have some more solid applications. I often use it as my first example when I'm introducing the idea of subconscious biases to people, because it's clear, surprising, and has major real-world effects. It also tends to shut up people who don't believe there are subconscious influences on decision-making, and who are always willing to find some excuse for why a supposed "bias" could actually be an example of legitimate decision-making.

And it introduces the concept of implicit egoism, the tendency to prefer something just because it's associated with you. It's one possible explanation for the endowment effect, and if it applies to my beliefs as strongly as to my personal details or my property, it's yet another mechanism by which opinions become calcified.

This is also an interesting window onto the complex and important world of self-esteem. Jones, Pelham et al suggest that the name preference effect is either involved in or a byproduct of some sort of self-esteem regulatory system. They find that name preferences are most common among high self-esteem people who have just experienced threats to their self-esteem, almost as if it is a reactive way of saying "No, you really are that great." I think an examination of how different biases interact with self-esteem would be a profitable direction for future research.

I noticed that most recommendations in the recent recommended readings thread consist of either fiction or popularizations of specific scientific disciplines. This introduces a potential bias: aspiring rationalists may never learn about some fields or ideas that are important for the art of rationality, just because they've never been popularized.

In my recent post on the fair division of black-hole negentropy, I tried to introduce two such ideas/fields (which may be one too many for a single post :). One is that black holes have entropy quadratic in mass, and therefore are ideal entropy dumps (or equivalently, negentropy mines). This is a well-known result in thermodynamics, plus an obvious application of it. Some have complained that the idea is too sci-fi, but actually the opposite is true. Unlike other perhaps equally obvious futuristic ideas such as cryonics, AI and the Singularity, I've never read or watched a piece of science fiction that explorered this one. (BTW, in case it's not clear why black-hole negentropy is important for rationality, it implies that value probably scales superlinearly with material and that huge gains from cooperation can be directly derived from the fundamental laws of physics.)

Similarly, there are many popularizations of topics such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Nash Equilibrium in non-cooperative game theory (and even a blockbuster movie about John Nash!), but I'm not aware of any for cooperative game theory.

Much of Less Wrong, and Overcoming Bias before it, can be seen as an attempt to correct this bias. Eliezer's posts have provided fictional treatments or popular accounts of probability theory, decision theory, MWI, algorithmic information theory, Bayesian networks, and various ethical theories, to name a few, and others have continued the tradition to some extent. But since popularization and writing fiction are hard, and not many people have both the skills and the motivation to do them, I wonder if there are still other important ideas/fields that most of us don't know about yet.

So here's my request: if you know of such a field or idea, just name it in a comment and give a reference for it, and maybe say a few words about why it's important, if that's not obvious. Some of us may be motivated to learn about it for whatever reason, even from a textbook or academic article, and may eventually produce a popular account for it.