There are two ways confirmation bias works. One is that it’s easier to think of confirming evidence than disconfirming evidence. The associative links tend to be stronger. When you’re thinking of a hypothesis you tend to believe, it’s easy to think of evidence that supports it.
The stronger one is that there’s a miniature Ugh field[1] surrounding thinking about evidence and arguments that would disprove a belief you care about. It only takes a flicker of a thought to make the accurate prediction about where considering that evidence could lead: admitting you were wrong, and doing a bunch of work re-evaluating all of your related beliefs. Then there’s a little unconscious yuck feeling when you try to pay attention to that evidence.
I usually like to call only the first “confirmation bias” and only the second “motivated reasoning”.
Also I’d rather phrase the first like: Our expectations influence our information processing in a way that causes causes confirming evidence to be more salient and thereby we update on it more.
I’m still a bit confused why this is the case. Your “the links are weaker” seems quite plausible, but if so I’d still like to understand why the links are weaker.
On priors I rather would’ve expected that the brain uses surprise-propagation algorithms that promote information to attention that doesn’t fit our existing models, since those have the most relevant information to update on.
I’d be interested in more precise models of confirmation bias.
It’s not at all obvious to me that motivated reasoning is worse than the first kind of confirmation bias (they might both be really devastating).
Great questions; it sounds like you’ve really thought about this stuff! I don’t have time to answer in satisfying detail right now, but I’d be interested in talking about this. Doing a better post on this and relating it to work and biases in alignment research is on my to-do list.
I usually like to call only the first “confirmation bias” and only the second “motivated reasoning”.
Also I’d rather phrase the first like: Our expectations influence our information processing in a way that causes causes confirming evidence to be more salient and thereby we update on it more.
I’m still a bit confused why this is the case. Your “the links are weaker” seems quite plausible, but if so I’d still like to understand why the links are weaker.
On priors I rather would’ve expected that the brain uses surprise-propagation algorithms that promote information to attention that doesn’t fit our existing models, since those have the most relevant information to update on.
I’d be interested in more precise models of confirmation bias.
It’s not at all obvious to me that motivated reasoning is worse than the first kind of confirmation bias (they might both be really devastating).
Great questions; it sounds like you’ve really thought about this stuff! I don’t have time to answer in satisfying detail right now, but I’d be interested in talking about this. Doing a better post on this and relating it to work and biases in alignment research is on my to-do list.