Map and Territory, Predictably Wrong (2)
Crossposted (with small tweaks) from my Substack.
Burdensome Details
This post explains the conjunction fallacy, i.e., people sometimes assign a higher probability to A and B together than to either A or B alone. This is usually motivated by the fact that adding more details tends to make scenarios seem more plausible—and therefore more ‘believable’—but it is a mathematical truth that the probability of A and B cannot exceed the probability of either A or B, since their conjunction is a subset of both.
A way to guard against this fallacy is to be alert to conjunctions in propositions. You should automatically assume that every additional ‘and’ can only lower—or leave unchanged—the probability of the proposition.
Planning Fallacy
Another fallacy to add to our list! The gist of the planning fallacy is that we are overoptimistic in our estimates of how long our projects will take to complete; in fact, our ‘realistic’ estimates often lie remarkably close to the most optimistic scenarios we can imagine.
It is relatively easy to debug though: you need to apply an ‘outside view’ that compares the current project with similar past projects and considers how long they took to complete. The extra details of the current situation only obscure the comparison.
Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You
Hindsight bias is briefly mentioned (once you’ve seen the outcome of an event, you can’t help thinking it was inevitable and easy to foresee before it happened), but the gist of this post deals with a related, but different bias: the illusion of transparency.
The latter consists in believing that what you mean by what you say will be transparent to people who lack your context and background knowledge. A closely related form of the curse of knowledge appears when, because we know something, we expect others to be aware of it as well and overlook possible ambiguities because, to us, ‘it is obvious!’
Expecting Short Inferential Distances
This bias doesn’t actually get a name apart from the title of the post. Yud himself says that it is difficult to explain in a few words, but here’s my best shot: we tend to expect that we should easily understand technical explanations—and that others should easily understand ours—after only a few short inferential steps.
This might have made sense in small hunter-gatherer societies, where there was relatively little specialized technical knowledge and much of what people knew was shared. But once you have complex societies and specialist areas of knowledge, this breaks down, making communication between experts and lay audiences extremely difficult.
The Lens That Sees Its Own Flaws
This one isn’t a bias, but rather, a useful capacity we possess and a nice way to round off this sequence.
Humans, as opposed to animals, possess deliberate rationality: we can understand and reflect on the processes through which we form beliefs and construct meaning. This is an exceptional skill.
Because we can ‘see how the machinery works’ and reflect on its failings, we can correct the errors we make (be them of perception or of cognition).
Some Thoughts of Mine
Not much to say here. What Yud explains seems to be, prima facie, plausible. I’ve encountered these biases in other sources before.
As a teacher, you get plenty of practice in combating the illusion of transparency because you receive constant, real-time feedback about whether your students have really understood what you have explained, even when it seems trivial to you.
While reading about inferential distances, what came to mind was how incredibly baffled I get when trying to understand moral realists. Because a lot of people whose intelligence I respect fall into this reference class, I try to read and listen to their arguments, but I have yet to find one that does not strike me as outrageously silly and circular—almost self-evidently false—to the point that it makes me doubt my sanity and/or that of its proponents[1]. As many of them are philosophers and metaethicists, it could be a case of inferential distance, although I feel it is more that, when we reach the bedrock of our intuitions, mine are fundamentally different from theirs.
Similarly, The Lens… makes me reflect on one particularly strong belief I hold: i.e., full-blooded mathematical Platonism. While I dislike psychologizing people (including myself), I think this belief is so emotionally important to me because what attracts me to mathematics is its ability to provide the kind of dogmatic, inflexible, certain, and eternal truth that, as a matter of deep temperament, I seem to crave[2]. That doesn’t mean the belief is false, but it should update me towards being somewhat more critical of it.
Note: I used ChatGPT for minimal proofreading/copyediting—fixing typos, grammar mistakes and suggestions of awkward or unidiomatic phrasing. The text, views, and responsibility for the post are mine.
- ^
If you’re reading this and a moral realist, feel free to suggest good arguments or works for me to read. I’d be grateful if you included a short summary of them, because I am not enthusiastic about devoting many hours to reading a book whose argument continues to seem foolish from page 1 to page 300.
- ^
You might guess from this—and you’d be right—that I am strongly averse to uncertainty. I accept it as a curse we have to live with, but one that I ultimately loathe. In another universe, I suspect I would have been happy as an Auditor of Reality. This also means I’ve never felt particularly drawn to probability theory or to other areas of mathematics concerned with uncertainty.
Re: moral realism, I’ve got 2 for you:
Think about whatever you believe is right (or wrong) that you would argue for. You probably don’t argue that it’s just your opinion.
We can’t prove modus ponens or that A=A. We can’t prove that we’re not in a simulation. Therefore math and induction and science are all theories. We can’t have certainty. But we have intuitions about logic as well as morality.
Hey! Thanks for the comment! I really appreciate it!
I mean, for 1, I do think that most things I believe are, reductionistically speaking, ‘just my opinion’, in the sense that they lack a strong, unassailable foundation. I just feel its very easy for to to compartmentalize ‘I have strong (and emotional) opinions about x’ from ‘I have a strong conviction and evidence that x is true’. For some of those beliefs I could perhaps fall back on what could count as acceptable evidence and/or arguments in their support that third parties would recognize. If we center on ethics, yes, there’s lots of stuff I feel strongly about: in most respects, I am your average WEIRD Westerner, and have been aligned since youth to find some stuff horrible, but I just fail to see the epistemic credentials of my moral intuitions. This connects with your second point: while ultimately, you can argue that it’s turtles all the way down and that logic, math, science, induction… ultimately rest on intuitions, I feel you are skipping a significant difference here. All of the latter are intuitions that can be tested with respect to some External World (it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to give metaphysical foundation to an external, nonhuman reality. It suffices to accept that we seem to interact with some outer world that has seems to have laws of its own that can be discovered and tested, have decent predictive power and that seem to have bad effects when you try to ignore them). You might not have certainty, but empirical observation, causality, logical consistency and mathematical modelling can be tested; while the moral intuitions cannot.
Agreed that empirical knowledge can be tested, but what about knowledge not gained through the senses? You believe in the law of non-contradiction, right? There’s no experiment that can be run to prove it’s true. Maybe logical beliefs are similar to moral beliefs?
I am generally very skeptical of purported knowledge that is neither gained through the senses nor independently constrained by empirical reality (but then, see my mathematical platonism). But in the case of logic (and math), I feel they are vindicated by contact with reality in a way in which moral beliefs aren’t. Math is indispensible for all our scientific explanations—without it, there would hardly be anything left in science; Logic can’t be proved by experiment, but Reality appears not to instantiate logical contradictions (so it is also indispensible). By contrast, objective moral facts seem explanatorily dispensible. I mean, you need them for social interaction, positive-sum games, but a world A where some moral beliefs are intrinsically, objectively true and a world B where they don’t exist work in exactly the same perceptible, visible, detectable way.
When you say “2 + 2 = 4” and then find 2 of something and 2 more and count 4, a logical intuition is instantiated.
When you say, “It would be good to help that old lady across the street,” and then you don’t help her, and regret it, a moral intuition is instantiated.
...I think?
I think I might not have explained myself clearly in the previous comment. What I meant by instantiate was something like ‘validated by experience’, not ‘manifested in experience’. In the 2+2 case, your intuition gets externalized in a way that provides for independent checking (you can count again, somebody else who wasn’t there can count them and tell you the answer, etc...). The world constrains the answer. In the regret example, the regret testifies to a psychological state, which can be shared by others (or not?; definitely less shared than 2+2) but how you or others feel about an event is not constrained by the world. There is no detectable difference in a world were the only thing that changes in that scenario from feeling to not feeling regret. There is a world of difference (pun intended) in a world where adding two objects generates four to a world where adding two objects generates five.
I agree, with the one caveat that I think there is a detectable difference in a moral world and an amoral world. But the difference is normative and not absolute. If someone thinks misery is just as good as flourishing, then there’s no way to differentiate.
...but what about someone who doesn’t believe in non-contradtiction? He is logically confused; the misery-preferer is normatively confused.
I wouldn’t dispute there’s some difference, i.e., given a set of normative values, an inner/outer observer would judge (and feel?) the situations differently depending on their values. I just don’t think it is doing any truth-tracking about reality. Your second example (‘the misery-preferer is normatively confused’) reminds me of a strategy I usually find in moral realists which I do not find convincing: it tries to establish a parallelism between logical rationality and normative rationality (there are ends or actions you have reason to choose regardless of your desires). I just disagree with the latter: there are no ends you have ‘rational reason’ to choose except those you desire as part of your preferences, and this is just some kind of quasi-Kantian attempt to smuggle normative ethics into reason. Affirming someone is ‘normatively confused’ seems to imply there is some correct, ‘objective’ set of norms a rational being has to follow lest he/she fall into error. Reason can tell you that your beliefs are inconsistent, or that your chosen means won’t achieve your ends, but I don’t see how reason by itself can supply the terminal ends.
Well, it tracks the truth that human values do exist, even if they vary somewhat. But agreed that it doesn’t tell you that there’s a source for normative values, or what that source might be.
Such a good point. Instrumental values are in the realm of logic (logically derived from terminal values) -- so given a terminal value, we can be logically right or wrong about the instrumental values that follow.
I have wondered (but perhaps haven’t stated clearly) if it is a fact about conscious minds that we have but one terminal value—a vague desire for “the good.” All our other values, even health, love, and not-misery, are instrumentally derived. If it is a fact that minds desire what they deem good (not that I can prove it), would that sway you at all toward moral realism?
In other words if it is a fact about minds that they desire the good, then the question becomes not “does goodness exist” but “what is good?”
Or would you just say well that makes goodness real for minds, but not objectively? This may be fair, but what does “objectively” mean in this case?
Or here’s a better intuition pump: argue for something you believe in vehemently, but don’t act like it’s actually true.