For an experimental setup, imagine a situation where you describe a situation to a group of people from random professions vs. to a programmer; I would be very surprised if it didn’t turn out that programmers start saying “you should do X and Y”, with non-programmers asking more questions. The more “technical” the topic the greater I’d expect the difference to be.
Don’t get me wrong, programmers tend to be more rational than non-programmers. But that does not rule out the existence of specific pitfalls that programmers fall into more than non-programmers (or at least high-grade rationalists who are not programmers). In particular, I find it plausible that they may tend to fail at instrumental rationality (getting what they want, winning, achieving specific ends) more frequently in a non-programming context.
Regardless of the idea’s merit my intuition is that it deserves explicit attention for the sake of avoiding status quo bias.
Cognitive Biases Reinforced by Programming Supposing they exist, what are they? And what can we do about them?
Edit: Title changed.
I’ve posted Why learning programming is a great idea even if you’d never want to code for a living for feedback or collaborative editing.
Thanks for having the idea of using ’pads to work on draft posts. Great stride in helping the LW community of authors to collaborate more.
Sure. One common one is “jumping to solutions”.
For an experimental setup, imagine a situation where you describe a situation to a group of people from random professions vs. to a programmer; I would be very surprised if it didn’t turn out that programmers start saying “you should do X and Y”, with non-programmers asking more questions. The more “technical” the topic the greater I’d expect the difference to be.
I decided to get some feedback on a post on control markets.
Specifically I’d like info on what people would like me to give more inferential steps for.
I doubt they exist.
Don’t get me wrong, programmers tend to be more rational than non-programmers. But that does not rule out the existence of specific pitfalls that programmers fall into more than non-programmers (or at least high-grade rationalists who are not programmers). In particular, I find it plausible that they may tend to fail at instrumental rationality (getting what they want, winning, achieving specific ends) more frequently in a non-programming context.
Regardless of the idea’s merit my intuition is that it deserves explicit attention for the sake of avoiding status quo bias.
Yes. I enjoyed thinking about the possibility.