FewerErrors

• FewerErrors 4 Jun 2015 7:57 UTC

  3 points

  on: In Defense of the Fun­da­men­tal At­tri­bu­tion Error

  Correcting for correspondence bias means that more weight should be given to the situational explanation than the dispositional explanation, that I’m the sort of person who writes stupid articles that ramble on.

  I may have misunderstood you here, but I interpret the correspondence bias differently. Correcting for it doesn’t mean you should necessarily always put more weight on the situational explanation than the personality, which your example clearly shows would sometimes lead to mistakes. It means that you mostly don’t give it as much weight as you should.

  The Correspondence Bias is a bias that, on the whole, helps people arrive at more accurate, rather than less accurate, conclusions, and should be corrected with care to improving accuracy and correctness, rather than the mere elimination of bias.

  I think it’s useful to think of each bias as isolated. Correcting for the correspondence bias should always make you more accurate, because it’s defined relatively to what’s true. It doesn’t talk about comparing people with yourself. However it mostly might not make sense to think of it this way in practice, since interpreting others’ actions rarely happens without some sort of comparison with what you would do in the same situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a significant correlation between FAE and the opposite bias of underestimating the importance of your own personality in how you react to things.

  Does this sound like something you could agree with?

• FewerErrors 26 Mar 2015 6:00 UTC

  7 points

  on: Re­vis­it­ing Non-centrality

  I think that this is a very valuable line of analysis, but unfortunately, labelling something as a “fallacy” is very black and white given that different people will consider different items to be central or non-central.

  Would you say Yvain is commiting the Noncentral Fallacy by labeling it as a fallacy?

• FewerErrors 24 Mar 2015 12:02 UTC

  9 points

  on: What you know that ain’t so

  This phenomenon sounds to me like what makes the setup for a financial bubble. People are so sure that one (or more) assumptions hold that they ignore all the signs that they’re wrong. Maybe “The Semmelweiss Effect” is what you had in mind regarding a standard name? From Wikipedia: The Semmelweis reflex or “Semmelweis effect” is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.

• FewerErrors 24 Nov 2014 15:08 UTC

  3 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

  Hello everyone!

  I’m on my second day of being 25, scandinavian working with outsourcing in India. Have a Master’s in cybernetics.

  I stumbled upon LessWrong the other day, and was surprised to find that someone had made a community with the purpose of being less wrong. Being less wrong about things was something I had decided on by myself before finding this place, and I thought it has been really cool to discover that many of my own thoughts weren’t original at all. Someone had already thought, shared and discussed them a lot :)

  Big inspirations for me have been “Thinking fast and slow”, Fooled by randomness, and recently hpmor. Have a knack for favoring “shocking” ideas such as perfect market theory (“it’s all pure luck”), and naturally fell in love with the hypothesis of Technological Singularity.

  My viewpoint on life and other important matters seems to be a bit too closely correlated with how hungry I am, so I still have some way to go in terms of being as rational as possible. I also think I’m very special, but I’m no longer as sure as I used to be.