I think it’s pretty significantly unlike a fat person trying to avoid cake. At least when you fail to not eat cake, you notice. One might be able to hold to a restrictive diet by sheer willpower, albeit with great difficulty, but bias can’t simply be willed away.
At least when you fail to not eat cake, you notice.
It’s true that people don’t always notice but at least some of the time biases do end up smashing against reality (like the two examples I gave here).
albeit with great difficulty, but bias can’t simply be willed away.
I think Luke has given us reason to think they can be, although my point was that even if we know how to avoid biases, will we? Are we like fat people avoiding cake?
There’s a big difference between being able to train biases away and being able to will them away.
When you try to cut something out of your diet, you have a conflict between your urge to eat it and your desire to avoid it, which comes down to a battle of willpower unless you engineer your life to make the resolution easier. A fat person confronted with cake they have resolved not to eat knows that they will regret eating it, and with sufficient willpower, can resist.
When dealing with cognitive bias, on the other hand, the hard part is usually noticing you’re about to make a biased judgment at all. You’re not going to commit the Conjunction Fallacy, for instance, thinking “I know that the conjunction of all these specific things makes this prediction unlikely, but thinking that it’s probable is so tempting.” Noticing in retrospect, as in the examples you gave, is a very different thing from noticing prior to or during the decision, but doing the irrational thing anyway.
Of course I don’t think training away something is the same as willing away something. I’m making a distinction between training for something and succeeding at that something.
A fat person can train in a way similar to how we would train to avoid biases. They might strategize for the future knowing they would fail otherwise—like we might fail to recognize a bias we know we have. For example, they might plan a healthy grocery list for the entire month because they knew without that strategy they’d buy a lot of junk food. However, like Markowitz, they still end up failing given their training; fat people’s will fails them and they deviate from their strategy. So, I wonder if biases are similar in this way. One way to find this out, I think, is to drain people’s will power (it’s a finite resource) and see if they’re more susceptible to biases.
I think it’s pretty significantly unlike a fat person trying to avoid cake. At least when you fail to not eat cake, you notice. One might be able to hold to a restrictive diet by sheer willpower, albeit with great difficulty, but bias can’t simply be willed away.
It’s true that people don’t always notice but at least some of the time biases do end up smashing against reality (like the two examples I gave here).
I think Luke has given us reason to think they can be, although my point was that even if we know how to avoid biases, will we? Are we like fat people avoiding cake?
There’s a big difference between being able to train biases away and being able to will them away.
When you try to cut something out of your diet, you have a conflict between your urge to eat it and your desire to avoid it, which comes down to a battle of willpower unless you engineer your life to make the resolution easier. A fat person confronted with cake they have resolved not to eat knows that they will regret eating it, and with sufficient willpower, can resist.
When dealing with cognitive bias, on the other hand, the hard part is usually noticing you’re about to make a biased judgment at all. You’re not going to commit the Conjunction Fallacy, for instance, thinking “I know that the conjunction of all these specific things makes this prediction unlikely, but thinking that it’s probable is so tempting.” Noticing in retrospect, as in the examples you gave, is a very different thing from noticing prior to or during the decision, but doing the irrational thing anyway.
Of course I don’t think training away something is the same as willing away something. I’m making a distinction between training for something and succeeding at that something.
A fat person can train in a way similar to how we would train to avoid biases. They might strategize for the future knowing they would fail otherwise—like we might fail to recognize a bias we know we have. For example, they might plan a healthy grocery list for the entire month because they knew without that strategy they’d buy a lot of junk food. However, like Markowitz, they still end up failing given their training; fat people’s will fails them and they deviate from their strategy. So, I wonder if biases are similar in this way. One way to find this out, I think, is to drain people’s will power (it’s a finite resource) and see if they’re more susceptible to biases.