I agree with mattnewport’s use of “supposed to” if it’s in the sense of current usefulness. “It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do” as in “it is doing what we’d generally want it to do”. The ability to screen off tinting and lighting variations is probably more useful than the ability to perceive absolute colours. (If you see a Rubik’s cube through a yellow-tinted window and you want to figure out what colours are showing, then you don’t want the window to affect your answer.) But if we’re looking at a list of subscription options or choosing between TVs at a store, it would be vastly more preferable to have some neutral, non-relative way of evaluating the options, some way of having a $2000 TV evoke the same amount of happy desirability feelings whether you see it next to a $4000 TV or a $200 TV.
I’m not sure that the same neural mechanism is used to compare colours and to compare prices, but I could be convinced. (Is there any research on it? Are there any conditions that impair one of these processes, such that we could study them and see if the other process is impaired too?) If they are indeed the same, and I could choose to knock out that part of my brain or not (with no other side effects), then I think (very tentatively) that I would. I think I could deal with perceiving the blue tile as grey if it made me a much more rational economic decision-maker.
I really doubt that same neural mechanism is involved. Like P= 0.0005. We’re dealing with totally different areas of the brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years apart. I’m not even sure I see an obvious sense in which the optical illusion corresponds to the cognitive bias.
I don’t think it’s mechanically the same, or that there’s a value-of-magazine-subscriptions equivalent to double opponent cells in the visual cortex, but I think the two processes are conceptually solutions to the same problem.
The general problem is trying to pick out salient features from what’s currently in the attention without being distracted by the macro-level problem of how what’s currently in the attention differs from everything else.
So in color vision, that’s something like determining what parts of a field are redder or greener than others without being distracted by the entire field being redder than usual because it’s sunset. In purchasing, it’s something like deciding which of two meals is better value than another without being distracted by the whole menu being more expensive than normal because it’s a fancy restaurant.
Yeah, that was my intuition (though I hadn’t thought about it enough to get that confident). I was just posing the question to see if anyone actually wanted to argue a connection between the two processes or if they were only using it as an analogy. I got the impression that Yvain was using it as an analogy but that Nick was arguing or assuming that both cases were actually using the same cognitive processes.
I agree with mattnewport’s use of “supposed to” if it’s in the sense of current usefulness. “It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do” as in “it is doing what we’d generally want it to do”. The ability to screen off tinting and lighting variations is probably more useful than the ability to perceive absolute colours. (If you see a Rubik’s cube through a yellow-tinted window and you want to figure out what colours are showing, then you don’t want the window to affect your answer.) But if we’re looking at a list of subscription options or choosing between TVs at a store, it would be vastly more preferable to have some neutral, non-relative way of evaluating the options, some way of having a $2000 TV evoke the same amount of happy desirability feelings whether you see it next to a $4000 TV or a $200 TV.
I’m not sure that the same neural mechanism is used to compare colours and to compare prices, but I could be convinced. (Is there any research on it? Are there any conditions that impair one of these processes, such that we could study them and see if the other process is impaired too?) If they are indeed the same, and I could choose to knock out that part of my brain or not (with no other side effects), then I think (very tentatively) that I would. I think I could deal with perceiving the blue tile as grey if it made me a much more rational economic decision-maker.
I really doubt that same neural mechanism is involved. Like P= 0.0005. We’re dealing with totally different areas of the brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years apart. I’m not even sure I see an obvious sense in which the optical illusion corresponds to the cognitive bias.
I don’t think it’s mechanically the same, or that there’s a value-of-magazine-subscriptions equivalent to double opponent cells in the visual cortex, but I think the two processes are conceptually solutions to the same problem.
The general problem is trying to pick out salient features from what’s currently in the attention without being distracted by the macro-level problem of how what’s currently in the attention differs from everything else.
So in color vision, that’s something like determining what parts of a field are redder or greener than others without being distracted by the entire field being redder than usual because it’s sunset. In purchasing, it’s something like deciding which of two meals is better value than another without being distracted by the whole menu being more expensive than normal because it’s a fancy restaurant.
Yeah, that was my intuition (though I hadn’t thought about it enough to get that confident). I was just posing the question to see if anyone actually wanted to argue a connection between the two processes or if they were only using it as an analogy. I got the impression that Yvain was using it as an analogy but that Nick was arguing or assuming that both cases were actually using the same cognitive processes.