Note that cases where the tech tells you that it’s usual problem X, and you deny this, asserting that your thing is a special snowflake, is NOT a case of the opposite bias. It’s just a case of correct identification.
The opposite bias would be if the usual thing was going on, but the tech thought that it was some unusual thing.
Other IT-experienced people are welcome to correct me on this, but in my experience, the latter almost never happens, and when it does, it’s mostly with newbie techies, recent hires/trainees, etc.
This makes it substantially more likely that tech people have “usual problem bias” than that they have “unusual problem bias”, and that they are well-calibrated. The usual problem bias could be small or it could be large, but available evidence is fairly clear that it exists.
The point I was making was not that tech support is likely to have an “unusual problem bias,” but that being correctly calibrated with respect to usual and unusual problems will tend to appear like a “usual problem bias” when you examine in isolation the cases where they’re wrong, because you would tend to observe cases where they need a significant amount of evidence to persuade them of the presence of an unusual problem, but not an unusual one.
If you examine cases where they’re right, you may find a large number of cases where the customer insists that the problem is not addressed by the tech support’s script, only to be proven wrong; these often appear in the horror stories posted by tech support. Thus, tech support may to some extent be rationally discounting evidence favoring unusual problems.
Note that cases where the tech tells you that it’s usual problem X, and you deny this, asserting that your thing is a special snowflake, is NOT a case of the opposite bias. It’s just a case of correct identification.
The opposite bias would be if the usual thing was going on, but the tech thought that it was some unusual thing.
Other IT-experienced people are welcome to correct me on this, but in my experience, the latter almost never happens, and when it does, it’s mostly with newbie techies, recent hires/trainees, etc.
This makes it substantially more likely that tech people have “usual problem bias” than that they have “unusual problem bias”, and that they are well-calibrated. The usual problem bias could be small or it could be large, but available evidence is fairly clear that it exists.
The point I was making was not that tech support is likely to have an “unusual problem bias,” but that being correctly calibrated with respect to usual and unusual problems will tend to appear like a “usual problem bias” when you examine in isolation the cases where they’re wrong, because you would tend to observe cases where they need a significant amount of evidence to persuade them of the presence of an unusual problem, but not an unusual one.
If you examine cases where they’re right, you may find a large number of cases where the customer insists that the problem is not addressed by the tech support’s script, only to be proven wrong; these often appear in the horror stories posted by tech support. Thus, tech support may to some extent be rationally discounting evidence favoring unusual problems.