Cognitive Biases
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s article on heuristics and biases Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks is one of my favorite on the topic. I have read it a few times now and find it valuable every time.
Why is this topic interesting? Partly, because it is one of a handful of research areas in which sociology/psychology seems to contribute to fairly direct knowledge of how the brain works. More practically, H & B are interesting because one cannot avoid them.
Even when we are thinking hard and focusing narrowly on self awareness, it is practically impossible to avoid making these errors. The best we can hope for is to leave notes for ourselves (sometimes it might be wise to leave actual physical notes!) instructing us to distrust our convictions. But knowing you are wrong because you trust your passed-self’s authority isn’t really avoiding thinking with H & Bs, it is merely switching the train onto a different set of rails.
It seems true that, while many have explained the patterns of failure that can result from trusting these heuristics and biases, there are also important and powerful benefits from our brains having evolved to work this way.
In the table below, I outline simplistic thoughts trying to illustrate that every bias identified in Yudkowsky’s paper as a potential failure pattern also accounts for a great deal of human success. Together, they not only represent potential pitfalls in perception and reasoning, but constitute a great deal of what we consider the basic, innate human ability to act, adapt and get on in the World.
|
Cognitive Bias |
Heuristic Strength |
|
Availability—Information at-hand is adequate for risk |
Reasonable good caching algorithm in that recent work is |
|
Hindsight—Story explaining past accounts for outcome |
Learning! Emotional conviction of the connection between |
|
Black Swans—Assume unlikely events are more unlikely than |
Allows action in an uncertain world. Assume continuity |
|
Conjunction |
Great first guess because local action is most likely |
|
Probability Increases with Detail (A mixing of Conjunction |
Personal experience works this way in that we always have |
|
Confirmation—Confirming Facts are Selected from Sea of Facts |
Intentions and Synchronicity |
|
Anchoring, Adjustment and Contamination (Availability |
Data we experience in succession are often related |
|
Affect |
Action in uncertain situations is better than being |
|
Scope Neglect |
Rules available when little info is available but you an |
|
Calibration and Over Confidence |
Rules available when little info is available but you an |
|
Bystander Apathy |
Optimization and queuing heuristic. |
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