stop short of saying “hey, don’t forget the base-rate”.
Why is this a goal? Sure, if you’re trying to design an experiment to measure the fallacy, you likely don’t want to say “Hey, don’t forget about the thing I’m trying to determine whether you’ll forget or not”. But outside of this specific context, why not hit people over the head with the base rate? We want them to get probabilities right, presumably!
You can say “hey, don’t forget the base-rate” if people are doing a specific problem where you’ve identified that they need to remember the base-rate. But people do all sorts of problems all the time, in all sorts of circumstances; it might be possible to use approaches to make people naturally pay attention to the base-rate, whenever it comes up, without having to figure out when they’re making the mistake and reminding them of it.
I wonder whether using a space metaphor might help. Gigerenzer seems to apply this: drawing from an urn, imainging a population.
If you have an equals distribution (base rate 50%) you might use left/right, but this doesn’t gain much as 50⁄50 is already unbiased.
How about imagining the more likely candidates in front of you and the other behind you—that will likely put them out of your awareness and thus reducing their saliency. The question is what percentage that represents.
The same approach could be used to imagine positive candidates near and negative ones far away.
Why is this a goal? Sure, if you’re trying to design an experiment to measure the fallacy, you likely don’t want to say “Hey, don’t forget about the thing I’m trying to determine whether you’ll forget or not”. But outside of this specific context, why not hit people over the head with the base rate? We want them to get probabilities right, presumably!
You can say “hey, don’t forget the base-rate” if people are doing a specific problem where you’ve identified that they need to remember the base-rate. But people do all sorts of problems all the time, in all sorts of circumstances; it might be possible to use approaches to make people naturally pay attention to the base-rate, whenever it comes up, without having to figure out when they’re making the mistake and reminding them of it.
I wonder whether using a space metaphor might help. Gigerenzer seems to apply this: drawing from an urn, imainging a population. If you have an equals distribution (base rate 50%) you might use left/right, but this doesn’t gain much as 50⁄50 is already unbiased. How about imagining the more likely candidates in front of you and the other behind you—that will likely put them out of your awareness and thus reducing their saliency. The question is what percentage that represents. The same approach could be used to imagine positive candidates near and negative ones far away.