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maia
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What kinds of exercises you use to teach a skill like “checking consequentialism” should probably be placed in the greater context of a rationality curriculum. You have to know where the students are coming from at each step.
That said—making the assumption that the students are already familiar with the theory of heuristics and biases, and just need to learn how to apply them—I think most of these can be taught with similar kinds of hypotheticals and problems.
For checking consequentialism, you might want to focus on problems involving sunk costs. To illustrate how sunk costs can affect how someone automatically approaches a problem, split students up into groups (they will probably produce worse results as a group, which is good for this part) and give them all similar problems, with the initial conditions modified slightly. Example: “John has been working on his PhD for X years, and expects to finish in Y. He knows W and Z facts about how his degree will benefit him.” Modify parts of the problem, X and Y especially, to try and prime their System 1 for a different result. Have them make a decision quickly. Reconvene, discuss the problem, point out the issues with sunk costs and why the groups did or didn’t reach a different result.
This is just a starting activity; it could be followed by having students do more hypotheticals individually. The instructor needs to give a lot of feedback on the problems as they go, asking students key questions that they might not have thought of, so they’d ideally be well trained in a) rationality and b) drawing out student thinking.
Ideally the exercises wouldn’t require too much instructor skill, though, so I’ll think about this some more.
Some very nice person created a Sequences dependency tree: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~andwhay/postlist.html
I think it is better as a ‘guide’ to the Sequences than the wiki post, since many Sequence posts have dependencies that you only encounter partway through.
The “games & exercises” section is definitely useful. If it grows enough, it might eventually be worthwhile to make that a separate document of specific content to include in meetups.
The most novel part of this, to me, was the “Projects” section. This seems like an obviously good thing for meetups to do, which I hadn’t thought of structuring like that at all.
I don’t, but you might want to check out communities like Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) or Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) if you don’t get responses here.
Prizes leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, frankly.
They are only so efficient because you’re having many people spend their resources on a job that you’re only going to pay a few of them for doing. It makes good sense for the person paying prize money, but that’s part of the reason I tend to avoid competitions where prizes are offered: it feels like it will be a waste of my time. This is apparently an easy way to exploit online artists, too: ask several of them to do your design work for you, and pay only the one you like best. You get better designs, and most of them get a day of unpaid work.
On the other hand, these competitions are fairly small-scale, you’re paying everyone who has an exercise good enough to test, and it’s likely not a waste of mental effort even if I don’t come up with anything spectacular. So I don’t have a particular ethical problem with the SoTW prizes.
You’re using TVTropes here to generalize from fictional evidence. Normally you can apply this effectively to other works of fiction, but I think Methods is written largely with the aim of avoiding conventional ‘story-logic’ in favor of logic that could actually work in the real world.
You’re still using entirely fictional evidence.
Also, you are suggesting that Hermione was convinced that killing Draco was the right thing to do. That’s probably incorrect: she was described as saying she stunned Draco in a “fit of anger” and felt horrible afterward.
(The only reason I say “probably” is because the court Legilimens did, in fact, find her fantasizing about how she thought Draco might cause harm to her or Harry.)
Actually, based on the Legilimens finding all the fantasies about Draco and Snape conspiring to hurt Harry and her, I’ve adjusted my probability estimate that Hermione actually did it significantly upward.
Hermione has been having paranoid fantasies about her friends being harmed by Draco → Draco attacks her, she weakens Draco → Hermione is suddenly in a position of power over someone she views as a threat to her friends → Hermione temporarily goes crazy and tries to eliminate Draco.
However, my probability that she did this without mind control being the deciding factor is still virtually zero.
Suppose you know a golfer’s score on day 1 and are asked to predict his score on day 2. You expect the golfer to retain the same level of talent on the second day, so your best guesses will be “above average” for the [better-scoring] player and “below average” for the [worse-scoring] player. Luck, of course, is a different matter. Since you have no way of predicting the golfers’ luck on the second (or any) day, your best guess must be that it will be average, neither good nor bad. This means that in the absence of any other information, your best guess about the players’ score on day 2 should not be a repeat of their performance on day 1. …
The best predicted performance on day 2 is more moderate, closer to the average than the evidence on which it is based (the score on day 1). This is why the pattern is called regression to the mean. The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed. A few of the golfers who scored 66 on day 1 will do even better on the second day, if their luck improves. Most will do worse, because their luck will no longer be above average.
Now let us go against the time arrow. Arrange the players by their performance on day 2 and look at their performance on day 1. You will find precisely the same pattern of regression to the mean. … The fact that you observe regression when you predict an early event from a later event should help convince you that regression does not have a causal explanation.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
A shortcut for making less-biased predictions, taking base averages into account.
Regarding this problem: “Julie is currently a senior in a state university. She read fluently when she was four years old. What is her grade point average (GPA)?”
Recall that the correlation between two measures—in the present case, reading age and GPA—is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants. What is your best guess about that proportion? My most optimistic guess is about 30%. Assuming this estimate, we have all we need to produce an unbiased prediction. Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps:
Start with an estimate of average GPA.
Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence.
Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.
If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
This is an interesting suggestion on how to be more creative in approaching a problem.
My hunch is that you could do scholarship and learn a lot more about creativity, however. For instance, did you know that being in a room with the color green makes people generate more creative ideas? (Source: 59 Seconds.) That’s just a tidbit; there may be a lot more out there that’s already known!
It sounds like alcohol improved their automated, instantaneous processing—or in other words, System 1 thinking. Based on what I know about alcohol, I’d guess it still slows down your System 2 thinking considerably. In fact, that could even be an explanation for the improvement in System 1 speed: their fact-checker is disabled, so they answer with their intuition right away.
You don’t provide any examples and your text is too dense and abstract. Try using smaller words and shorter sentences. Also, you put too much emphasis on your numbering scheme: You bold “The first mistake” and then you de-emphasize the part where you actually say what that mistake is, and the rest of the paragraph is a wall of text.
It’s also, frankly, not very helpful.
The irrelevant data may find its way in your thoughts covertly, through priming effects you don’t even notice… Don’t think about fictional evidence, don’t think about the facts that look superficially relevant to the question, but actually aren’t
You can’t avoid priming effects once you’ve been primed. “Don’t think about it” just won’t work.
It seems like the main point of your post is to present biases in a new way: modeling them all as some form of “using the wrong data.” I’m skeptical that this is a helpful model, but honestly, I would probably be a lot less skeptical if your post focused on that main point more clearly.
Nitpick:
Plus, imagine the number of children each couple would have if people jumped from 40 fertile years to 80.
Why would you think that would happen? Women already regularly outlive their fertile periods in real life. Unless you’re also proposing some magical mechanism of fertility increase (and if so, why?), you wouldn’t expect fertile periods to increase.
Of course, wizards would have longer fertile periods, but you still bump into the hard limit of how many children witches are willing and able to have.
True, a single data point can’t give you knowledge of regression effects. In the context of the original problem, Kahneman assumed that you had access to the average score of all the golfers on the first day.
I played a video game for the first time yesterday. My score was 39700, and higher scores are better than lower ones. What’s your best guess for my score the next time I play it? (The answer is some number higher than 39700, because I’m no longer an absolute beginner.)
I’m not sure it’s true that the answer is higher than 39700, in this case. It depends on if you have knowledge of how people generally improve, and if your score is higher than average for an absolute beginner. Since unknown factors could adjust the score either up or down, I would probably just guess that it will be the same the next day.
Could be, although there is still menopause, which is more what I was thinking about… That seems less attached to a general concept of “health” to me for some reason.
Not exactly articles, but the DC meetup had good success with a TED-talk based meetup.
The group watched talks about meritocracy and failure, death, existential risk, and how people’s lives should be more awesome, and how advertising changes actual value. Each talk was spaced out by discussion.
So you estimate “regression to the mean” effects as zero, and base your estimate on any other effects you know about and how strong you think they are. That makes sense. Thanks for the correction!
We’re still very interested, and would be happy to host LW members in dorm rooms or anywhere else we can secure. (Speaking for myself and Roger here.)