I really like learning new things!
Jacob G-W
Karma: 482
I think I’ve noticed some sort of cognitive bias in myself and others where we are naturally biased towards “contrarian” or “secret” views because it feels good to know something that others don’t know / be right about something that so many people are wrong about.
Does this bias have a name? Is this documented anywhere? Should I do research on this?
GPT4 says it’s theIllusion of asymmetric insight, which I’m not sure is the same thing (I think it is the more general term, whereas I’m looking for one specific to contrarian views).(Edit: it’s totally not what I was looking for)Interestingly, it only hasone hit on lesswrong.I think more people should know about this (the specific one about contrarianism) since it seems fairly common.Edit: The illusion of asymmetric insight is totally the wrong name. It seems closer to the illusion of exclusivity although that does not feel right (that is a method for selling products, not the name of a cognitive bias that makes people believe in contrarian stuff because they want to be special).
Thank you for writing this! It expresses in a clear way a pattern that I’ve seen in myself: I eagerly jump into contrarian ideas because it feels “good” and then slowly get out of them as I start to realize they are not true.
I’m assuming the recent protests about the Gaza war: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/24/us/columbia-protests-mike-johnson
*Typo: Jessica Livingston not Livingstone
That is one theory. My theory has always been that ‘active learning’ is typically obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, especially ‘group work,’ and students therefore hate it. Lectures are also obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, but in a passive way that lets students dodge when desired. Also that a lot of this effect probably isn’t real, because null hypothesis watch.
Yep. This hits the nail on the head for me. Teachers usually implement active learning terribly but when done well, it works insanely well. For me, it actually works best when you have a very small class and a lecture that is also a discussion, with everyone asking questions when they are confused and making sure they are following closely (this works at least for science and math). Students hate the words active learning because it’s mostly things that are just terrible and don’t work (as it’s implemented today).
Thanks for this, it is a very important point that I hadn’t considered.
I’d recommend not framing this as a negotiation or trade (acausal trade is close, but is pretty suspect in itself). Your past self(ves) DO NOT EXIST anymore, and can’t judge you. Your current self will be dead when your future self is making choices. Instead, frame it as love, respect, and understanding. You want your future self to be happy and satisfied, and your current choices impact that. You want your current choices to honor those parts of your past self(ves) you remember fondly. This can be extended to the expectation that your future self will want to act in accordance with a mosty-consistent self-image that aligns in big ways with it’s past (your current) self.
Yep, this is what I had in mind when I wrote this:
Even if we bite all these bullets, there is still something weird to me about the contractual nature of it all. This is not some stranger I’m trying to make a deal with, it’s myself. There should be a gentler, nicer, way to achieve this same goal.
and
Going along with the “gentler” reasoning, it should want to do it because it has camaraderie with its past self. It should want its past self to be happy and it knows that to make it happy, it should take its preferences into account.
Thanks for expanding on this :)
I wrote a similar post.
I’d be interested in what a steelman of “have teachers arbitrarily grade the kids then use that to decide life outcomes” could be?
The best argument I have thought of is that America loves liberty and hates centralized control. They want to give individual states, districts, schools, teachers the most power they can have as that is a central part of America’s philosophy. Also anecdotally, some teachers have said that they hate standardized tests because they have to teach to it. And I hate being taught to for the test (like APs for example). It’s much more interesting where the teacher is teaching something they find interesting and enjoy (and thus can choose to assess on).
However, this probably does not outweigh the downsides and is probably a bad approach overall.
Related: Saving the world sucks
People accept that being altruistic is good before actually thinking if they want to do it. And they also choose weird axioms for being altruistic that their intuitions may or may not agree with (like valuing the life of someone in the future the same amount of someone today).
A question I have for the subjects in the experimental group:
Do they feel any different? Surely being +0.67 std will make someone feel different. Do they feel faster, smoother, or really anything different? Both physically and especially mentally? I’m curious if this is just helping for the IQ test or if they can notice (not rigorously ofc) a difference in their life. Of course, this could be placebo, but it would still be interesting, especially if they work at a cognitively demanding job (like are they doing work faster/better?).
Thanks! I’ve updated my post: https://jacobgw.com/blog/observation/2023/08/21/truth.html
Here’s a market if you want to predict if this will replicate: https://manifold.markets/g_w1/will-george3d6s-increasing-iq-is-tr
It has been 15 days. Any updates? (sorry if this seems a bit rude; but I’m just really curious :))
I think the more general problem is violation of Hume’s guillotine. You can’t take a fact about natural selection (or really about anything) and go from that to moral reasoning without some pre-existing morals.
However, it seems the actual reasoning with the Thermodynamic God is just post-hoc reasoning. Some people just really want to accelerate and then make up philosophical reasons to believe what they believe. It’s important to be careful to criticize actual reasoning and not post-hoc reasoning. I don’t think the Thermodynamic God was invented and then people invented accelerationism to fulfill it. It was precisely the other way around. One should not critique the made up stuff (besides just critiquing that it is made up) because that is not charitable (very uncertain on this). Instead, one should look for the actual motivation to accelerate and then criticize that (or find flaws in it).
Not everybody does this. Another way to get better is just to do it a lot. It might not be as efficient, but it does work.
Thank you for this post!
After reading this, it seems blindingly obvious: why should you wait for one of your plans to fail before trying another one of them?
This past summer, I was running a study on study on humans that I had to finish before the end of the summer. I had in mind two methods for finding participants; one would be better and more impressive and also much less likely to work, while the other would be easier but less impressive.
For a few weeks, I tried really hard to get the first method to work. I sent over 30 emails and used personal connections to try to collect data. But it didn’t work. So I did the thing that I thought to be “rational” at the time. I gave up and I sent my website out to some people who I thought would be very likely to do it. Sure enough, they did.
At the time, I thought I was being super-duper rational for allowing my first method to fail (not deluding myself that it would work and thus not collecting any data) and then quickly switching to the other method.
However, after reading this post, I realize that I still made a big mistake! I should have sent it out to as many people as possible all at once. This would have been a bit more work since I would have to deal with more people and they would use a slightly different structure, but I was not time constrained. I was subject constrained.
I’m going to instill this pattern in my mind and will use it when I do something that I think has a decent chance of failing (as my first method did).
A great example of more dakka: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/health/217-covid-vaccines.html
(Someone got 217 covid shots to sell vaccine cards on the black market; they had high immune levels!)
Oh sorry! I didn’t think of that, thanks!
Noted, thanks.