Conforming To Bias. If people know about status quo bias, the planning fallacy, or the endowment effect, they may feel the need to play into them in order to accomplish goals. Planners will deliberately make optimistic predictions, even when they know better, in order to appear competitive—even though the customer might prefer planners who make more realistic predictions. Product designers may deliberately sacrifice utility for familiarity, even if the unfamiliar product is actually easier to use even for a beginner than the familiar product. My guess is that the design of textbooks is an example here.
This suggests that building products and services that don’t conform to biases is a positive externality, and a proper target for regulation or subsidy. For example, governments could require major construction projects to submit a time and cost estimate when the contract is signed, and give a tax credit to companies that an external auditor assesses to have achieved above-average accuracy in their estimate.
Government could offer similar subsidies to combat the endowment effect. It could offer a tax credit for selling your house, moving out of an apartment, or changing your job, perhaps after you’ve owned the house or worked the job for a reasonable length of time. I’m skeptical of these interventions—just brainstorming to illustrate an idea.
Teaching Styles. Teachers can’t get much done if kids are being disrupted. Schools have varying populations of kids. They therefore “select” for teachers capable of managing the type and amount of disruption at their particular school. A tough teacher might be perfect for a rowdy school, but harmfully harsh in a more placid environment. A teacher who focuses on positive reinforcement but can’t dish out discipline might get steamrolled by the students in a rowdy school, but do well in an elite prep academy. If the teaching styles exhibited at the best performing schools (i.e. the elite prep academy) become exemplars for teacher training, then we risk attributing to a teaching style alone what is actually a teaching style x school culture interaction effect.
Self-Editing. I write in ways that are legible to me, because during the writing process I have access only to feedback provided by the editor in my mind. Its feedback, particularly in the very beginning stages when the general tone, topic, and form of a piece is being established, is crucial in dictating the direction the post will take. Over time, the partially-written piece becomes more powerful than the editor, but in the beginning the editor is more powerful than the writing. This causes me to select for writing approaches that my internal editor is comfortable with. If I had other external standards or influences—perhaps prompts, a particular audience, or a process involving seeking external feedback on a few very brief possible approaches to an article—I might be able to achieve more variety in my writing.
One way of looking at biases is that the bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria. For example, people decide who to trust with authority based on how tall they are. The tall-bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria (tallness) that doesn’t perfectly match what its’ supposed to be optimizing for (trustworthiness).
You might predict that people would take steps to create the appearance of tallness in order to manipulate this form of selection. Hillary Clinton apparently requested that her podium for a debate with Donald Trump be modified so that both candidates appeared to be the same height relative to the podium when standing in front of them, and for a step stool so that she’d appear to be the same height as DT when they stood behind the podium.
One way of looking at the rationality project is that our social systems have optimized themselves to exploit common biases in the human mind. That intersection will feel “normal.” Pointing out these biases isn’t just about moving from less truth → more truth. It’s also about moving from more commonly exploited heuristics → less commonly exploited heuristics. It may be that the new heuristics also have serious failure modes. But if society isn’t set up to systematically take advantage of them, being divergent might still be beneficial, even if it’s not fundamentally any more secure. It’s sort of like choosing an operating system or program that is obscure, because there’s less attention devoted to hacking it.
If you know how the selection incentive works for a particular situation, you can exploit it to your benefit, or at least prevent yourself from being in an unfavorable position.
Conforming To Bias. If people know about status quo bias, the planning fallacy, or the endowment effect, they may feel the need to play into them in order to accomplish goals. Planners will deliberately make optimistic predictions, even when they know better, in order to appear competitive—even though the customer might prefer planners who make more realistic predictions. Product designers may deliberately sacrifice utility for familiarity, even if the unfamiliar product is actually easier to use even for a beginner than the familiar product. My guess is that the design of textbooks is an example here.
This suggests that building products and services that don’t conform to biases is a positive externality, and a proper target for regulation or subsidy. For example, governments could require major construction projects to submit a time and cost estimate when the contract is signed, and give a tax credit to companies that an external auditor assesses to have achieved above-average accuracy in their estimate.
Government could offer similar subsidies to combat the endowment effect. It could offer a tax credit for selling your house, moving out of an apartment, or changing your job, perhaps after you’ve owned the house or worked the job for a reasonable length of time. I’m skeptical of these interventions—just brainstorming to illustrate an idea.
Teaching Styles. Teachers can’t get much done if kids are being disrupted. Schools have varying populations of kids. They therefore “select” for teachers capable of managing the type and amount of disruption at their particular school. A tough teacher might be perfect for a rowdy school, but harmfully harsh in a more placid environment. A teacher who focuses on positive reinforcement but can’t dish out discipline might get steamrolled by the students in a rowdy school, but do well in an elite prep academy. If the teaching styles exhibited at the best performing schools (i.e. the elite prep academy) become exemplars for teacher training, then we risk attributing to a teaching style alone what is actually a teaching style x school culture interaction effect.
Self-Editing. I write in ways that are legible to me, because during the writing process I have access only to feedback provided by the editor in my mind. Its feedback, particularly in the very beginning stages when the general tone, topic, and form of a piece is being established, is crucial in dictating the direction the post will take. Over time, the partially-written piece becomes more powerful than the editor, but in the beginning the editor is more powerful than the writing. This causes me to select for writing approaches that my internal editor is comfortable with. If I had other external standards or influences—perhaps prompts, a particular audience, or a process involving seeking external feedback on a few very brief possible approaches to an article—I might be able to achieve more variety in my writing.
Can you elaborate your first example more? How does selection incentive come into play in those situations?
One way of looking at biases is that the bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria. For example, people decide who to trust with authority based on how tall they are. The tall-bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria (tallness) that doesn’t perfectly match what its’ supposed to be optimizing for (trustworthiness).
You might predict that people would take steps to create the appearance of tallness in order to manipulate this form of selection. Hillary Clinton apparently requested that her podium for a debate with Donald Trump be modified so that both candidates appeared to be the same height relative to the podium when standing in front of them, and for a step stool so that she’d appear to be the same height as DT when they stood behind the podium.
One way of looking at the rationality project is that our social systems have optimized themselves to exploit common biases in the human mind. That intersection will feel “normal.” Pointing out these biases isn’t just about moving from less truth → more truth. It’s also about moving from more commonly exploited heuristics → less commonly exploited heuristics. It may be that the new heuristics also have serious failure modes. But if society isn’t set up to systematically take advantage of them, being divergent might still be beneficial, even if it’s not fundamentally any more secure. It’s sort of like choosing an operating system or program that is obscure, because there’s less attention devoted to hacking it.
If you know how the selection incentive works for a particular situation, you can exploit it to your benefit, or at least prevent yourself from being in an unfavorable position.