Overcoming Bias

As ye judge those who fund thee, ye shall be judged

"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy."
Huxley, Aldous

Robin is always keen to remind us how status-seeking humans are, and the above quote is a gem in that regard. Laced through it are the claims that art is valuable, that patrons are vital to art, and yet that these patrons should be disdained - especially compared with the poor-but-high-status artist.

This can be expanded into a general test for detecting self-serving status-seeking. It isn’t enough to show that people are attracted to high status professions (people’s opinions of status varies, and they may have decided that certain professions are worthwhile to the world, and thus accorded them higher status). It isn’t even enough to note that people’s everyday behavior is status seeking – unless we can estimate the marginal difficulties in making a “worthwhile” profession more worthy, versus the marginal difficulties in increasing status.

However Huxley’s quote gives us a way of controlling these variables. If a profession is deemed worthwhile to the world, then those who enable it, or fund it, are equally worthwhile. If someone would accord their own work a high status but disdains patrons/funding bodies/stockholders, then their own status seeking is plain to see.

The converse is also true; one artist, at least, gets it:

"If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates."
Pound, Ezra

Evaporated Cane Juice

The ingredient list of Trader Joe's Brand Spinach Pizza includes "Organic Evaporated Cane Juice (Natural Milled Cane Sugar)."  Just as grinding up oranges makes "orange juice", grinding up sugar cane plants makes "cane juice."  To get sugar, you evaporate this to get rid of the water.  

What fraction of folks who read such ingredient lists could really fooled by calling sugar "evaporated cane juice", especially when it is called "sugar" more directly just a few words later?  Could the gain from fooling this few really outweigh the loss of respect from all the other readers Trader Joe's should suffer?

My guess is that other readers are not much offended because they enjoy feeling superior to the fools mislead by such ingredient wordings.  The warm glow from feeling superior outweighs any lack of respect, or feeling insulted, and on net encourages such readers to continue to buy the product.

Added:  OK, uncle; I accept there are legitimate reasons for this wording, at least for some people.

Be sure to mind when you change your mind

The biggest of blindspots spring up when our minds form opinions about our minds. Here the question is: when we change our opinions, are we aware of that fact? The obvious answer is yes; the true answer is hinted at by Goethals and  Reckman’s 1973 experiment:

High school students were asked their opinions on a variety of social issues, including on how children should be bussed to school and whether it would help with racial integration. [...]

A couple of weeks later the students were invited back for a further discussion on the bussing issue. This time, though, they were split into two groups, one that was pro- and one anti- the bussing issue. [...]

The two groups had separate discussions about the bussing issue, but amongst their number had been planted an experimental confederate. The confederate was armed with a series of highly persuasive arguments designed to change the participant's minds on the issue. Experimenters wanted to turn the pro- group into an anti- group and the anti- group into a pro-group.

The confederates turned out to be extremely persuasive (and/or the students were easy to sway!) and the two groups were successfully turned around.[...]

But what happened when they were asked about this change of opinion?

Posting now enabled on Less Wrong

Posting is now enabled on Less Wrong, with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post.  Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability - in the long run this shouldn't happen much.

For those of you who haven't yet subscribed to / gotten in the habit of checking Less Wrong:

• Test Your Rationality by Robin Hanson.  It's easy to find reasons to believe yourself more rational than others, but most people do this; what real ways can be found to test your rationality?
• Unteachable Excellence and Teaching the Unteachable by Eliezer Yudkowsky.  The rare superstars are rare because their skills are currently hard to transfer.  A large number of Nobel laureates are students of other Nobel laureates.  How do you teach skills you can't put into words?
• The Costs of Rationality by Robin Hanson.  Rationality can be useful for many things, but humans aren't really designed for it, and a true effort to believe truly can get in the way of many aspects of ordinary life.  Are you willing to pay the real costs of ratonality?
• No, Really, I've Deceived Myself and Belief in Self-Deception by Eliezer Yudkowsky.  A woman I met who didn't seem to believe in God at all, while honestly believing that she had deceived herself successfully - which may bring most of the same placebo benefits.
• The ethic of hand-washing and commuity epistemic practice by Steve Rayhawk and Anna Salamon.  Diseases become more virulent in the presence of poor hygiene, since they can jump hosts more easily.  Are there analogous effects for ideas?  What is the equivalent of washing our hands?

The five most recent LW posts now appear in OB's sidebar (and vice versa), but aside from this you shouldn't expect further regular summaries of LW on OB.

Lying With Style

Clear and Simple as the Truth, the best book I've read in years, explains the virtues and lies of a very popular writing style.  Excerpts:

A [writing] style is defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships. ... Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. ...

Classic style is focused and assured. Its virtues are clarity and simplicity; in a sense, so are its vices. It declines to acknowledge ambiguities, unessential qualifications, doubts, or other styles. It declines to acknowledge that it is a style. It makes its hard choices silently and out of the reader's sight. Once made, those hard choices are not acknowledged to be choices at all; they are presented as if they are inevitable, because classic style is, above all, a style of presentation with claims to transparency. ...

Classic style is neither shy nor ambiguous about fundamentals. The style rests on the assumptions that it is possible to think disinterestedly, to know the results of disinterested thought, and to present them without fundamental distortion. In this view, thought precedes writing. All of these assumptions may be wrong, but they help to define a style whose usefulness is manifest. ...

Question Medical Findings

A recurring theme here is the difficulty in knowing whether some (much?) of modern healthcare is actually beneficial or not.  A couple of recent links that add support to that theme:

1. From JAMA, a new study analyzes more than two decades of heart care guidelines (that is, the guidelines that your doctor might follow in deciding how to treat you) from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. The study found that the overwhelming majority of recommendations are not supported by good evidence:

Level of evidence provides the link between recommendations and evidence base. Although there is significant variation among individual guidelines in available evidence supporting recommendations, the median of level of evidence A recommendations [i.e., those supported by more than one randomized trial] is only 11% across current guidelines, whereas the most common grade assigned is level of evidence C, indicating little to no objective empirical evidence for the recommended action. . . . Interestingly, our findings are reflective of a specialty — cardiology — that has a large pool of research to draw on for its care recommendations. Guidelines in other medical areas in which large clinical trials are performed less frequently may have an even weaker evidence-based foundation.

2. In this post, Dr. Eades criticizes (convincingly, I think) a recent study purporting to show that statins reduce mortality.

Six Months Later

Six months ago I asked here what Tyler Cowen and I should discuss on Blogging Heads TV.  I got sick on our scheduled day, but we are finally on again for Tuesday.  Your suggestions from before are fine, but an awful lot has happened since - not quite 28 Days Later scale, but a lot.  So I thought I'd ask again; Tyler also asked at Marginal Revolution. 

Also, March 24 I will debate Bryan Caplan at GMU on "Liberty vs. Efficiency."  What a fun month!

What Changed?

It is becoming increasingly clear that Obama's proposed policies go well beyond what we might need just to respond to the economic crisis; he's making a bid for great changes in national policy.  The Democrats do now control the U.S. presidency and both houses of Congress, but usually that wouldn't be enough to think they could get away with this; they would fear a public backlash at the next election.  So they must think the public is now more receptive to Democrat-style large policy changes.  I don't know that they are wrong, but this does raise the question: if so, what does the public think has changed?

Economists don't think this crisis has added that much to our total dataset; Obama's economists may think his new proposals are good ideas, but they almost all thought so a year ago as well.  So is it that the public learned something that experts already knew?  Or does the public just want to affiliate with the impressive unusually high-status elites pushing these proposals? 

Bryan Caplan asks:

If the government had followed a laissez-faire policy for the last six months, and output, employment, housing, and financial markets stood exactly where they stand today, what fraction of people would conclude that "Events decisively prove that laissez-faire is a disaster"?  Can you honestly give any answer less than 90%?

My best guess is that we are seeing the "ratchet effect"; voters expect more government to be a better response to most any big crisis than less government.  Let me pose the question differently:  can you imagine any crisis where voters would expect a substantial reduction in government to be the best response?  If you can't, that says there is almost no prospect for a crisis-induced libertarian revolution.

Status Affiliation Puzzles

Recently I posted on otherwise puzzling behavior that can be easily explained via seeking status via affiliations.

• Students prefer distracted profs who grade and recommend corruptibly.
• Macro and foreign advisors have fancy affiliations, not forecast track records.
• Patients prefer docs with prestigious affiliations over health success rates.

I see more examples:

• Voters far prefer representatives over direct democracy or random selection.
• Donors prefer to picking grantees, over giving prizes to whoever succeeds.
• Homeowners don't give good money incentives to real estate brokers.
• Investors prefer actively managed funds that lose on average.  
• Decision markets lose overwhelmingly to heroic "decider" managers.

In all these cases standard economic accounts seem to seriously miss the mark by ignoring strong human desires to gain status via affiliation.  As most of my institution design efforts suffer this problem, understanding this better is, to me, of the highest priority.

Added 3Mar:  It is usually possible to make up many explanations for any puzzling behavior, and some of these may fit well with our own conscious explanations for our behavior.  But the details in most of these cases seems hard to fit with most of the other proposed explanations, and we know that status is very important to people yet they do not like to admit they do things for status. 

The key to taking this idea further is to better understand just what sort of relations most confer status via affiliation.  It seems to me that arms-length formal relations where you each minimize your risk from the other's bad behavior do not show a mutually trusting relation, which as a closer connection confers more status via the relation.  So people are eager to trust high status affiliates, without evidence and even against the evidence. 

OB meetup Friday 13th 7PM Springfield VA

Do you believe in luck?  If not, and you live near DC, come to an OB meetup at my place southwest of Washington DC on Friday March 13th, at 7PM!  If you reply to this post and say you want to come, AND provide your real e-mail in the "email" line when you post, I'll email back with details.  (The email address provided by each commentator gets sent to the author of the original post.)

Even if I know you're coming, replying here will let others know who's coming.