When should we defer to experts, and on what grounds? My general view is More often than most people do. But it’s a complicated question; as Phil Tetlock has shown, not every credentialed expert is worthy of our deference, for example. And even if you want to defer, summarizing what the experts actually think can be …
Tag Archives: bias
Why I think the Vox crew is too cynical about bias and belief
Will this post convince anyone? I’m optimistic. The Vox policy podcast, The Weeds, had a long segment on bias and political belief this week, which was excellent. I didn’t disagree with anything Ezra Klein, Sarah Kliff, and Matthew Yglesias said, but I think they left out some reasons for optimism. If you can only tell …
Continue reading “Why I think the Vox crew is too cynical about bias and belief”
Como se dice… bias?
One of the coolest paper abstracts I’ve read, via MR, presented without comment: Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a …
Gizmodo’s take on objectivity is regrettable
I’ve got plenty of complaints regarding the sort of he-said-she-said faux objectivity that has overwhelmed much of the traditional media, and I’ve written as much here on the blog. It’s Jay Rosen’s “quest for innocence” – the desire to be blameless that drives impartiality off the deep end to the point where it hurts readers. …
Continue reading “Gizmodo’s take on objectivity is regrettable”
Being told “Be Rational” doesn’t de-bias
More bias research. I’ve been digging in pretty deeply on interventions that help mitigate motivated reasoning and the results aren’t great. There’s self-affirmation, which I discussed in my Atlantic piece, but beyond that it’s pretty thin picking. Motivated reasoning doesn’t track significantly with open-mindedness, and interventions urging participants to be rational seem to have little …
Don’t blog on an empty stomach
http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf (The clip above covers some basics of mental energy and depletion.) The alternative title for this post was “I’m hungry; you’re wrong.” I’m not sure which is better… In any case, consider this bit from Kahneman: Resisting this large collection of potential availability biases is possible, but tiresome. You must make the effort to …
Fight bias with math
I just finished the chapter in Kahneman’s book on reasoning that dealt with “taming intuitive predictions.” Basically, we make predictions that are too extreme, ignoring regression to the mean, assuming the evidence to be stronger than it is, and ignoring other variables through a phenomenon called “intensity matching.” Here’s an example (not from the book; …
Why we need journalists (good ones)
I’m in the middle of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. From Chapter 16: Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases – two nice people who had not helped – …
So you’re smart, but are you reasonable?
I was searching for this phantom post pointing to research on verbal reasoning scores and bias (I swear I saw it!) when I came across a fascinating a 1997 paper titled Reasoning Independently of Prior Belief and Individual Differences in Actively Open-Minded Thinking. It’s got some neat if perhaps not totally unsurprising conclusions. First, a …
Bylines and “cultural credibility”
My latest Atlantic post is up: As I wrote in a previous story, media outlets have an opportunity to design media that accounts for users’ biases. Author bios present such a chance. Without any change to the authors or their content, bios could be constructed in a way that maximizes cultural credibility by tapping into the …
beyond the times 