Somewhat relatedly, I considered the idea of creating a ‘Bias-Quotient’ type test. It could go some way to popularising rationality and bias-aversion. A lot more people like the idea of being right than are actually aware of biases and other such behavioural stuff.
I anticipate that many of these people would do the test expecting to share their score somewhere online and gain relative intellect-prestige from an expected high score. On discovering that they’re more biased than they believed, I believe that, provided the test’s response to a low score were engaging and informative (and not annoying and pedantic), they would on net be genuinely interested in overcoming this, with a link to Less Wrong somewhere appropriate. They might share the test regardless of their low score with an annotation such as ‘check this—very interesting!’. That’s all based on my model of how a lot of aspiring intelligent people behave. It may be biased.
This could open to a lot of people the doors to beginning to overcome the failures of their visceral probability heuristics, as well as the standard set of cognitive biases. The test’s questions may need to be considerably dynamic to avert the possibility that people condition to specific problems without shedding the entire infected heuristic.
Somewhat relatedly, I considered the idea of creating a ‘Bias-Quotient’ type test. It could go some way to popularising rationality and bias-aversion. A lot more people like the idea of being right than are actually aware of biases and other such behavioural stuff.
I anticipate that many of these people would do the test expecting to share their score somewhere online and gain relative intellect-prestige from an expected high score. On discovering that they’re more biased than they believed, I believe that, provided the test’s response to a low score were engaging and informative (and not annoying and pedantic), they would on net be genuinely interested in overcoming this, with a link to Less Wrong somewhere appropriate. They might share the test regardless of their low score with an annotation such as ‘check this—very interesting!’. That’s all based on my model of how a lot of aspiring intelligent people behave. It may be biased.
This could open to a lot of people the doors to beginning to overcome the failures of their visceral probability heuristics, as well as the standard set of cognitive biases. The test’s questions may need to be considerably dynamic to avert the possibility that people condition to specific problems without shedding the entire infected heuristic.