Incentivizing bias

Every profession has incentive to increase the perceived value of what it does. As a result, we receive large doses of propaganda from every profession.

As a kid, everyone profession can seem pretty impressive. If you picture every profession as a tower, these towers are much taller in our minds than they are in reality.

But what happens when you get to the top of one of these towers (i.e., when you become a certified plumber, MD, teacher, yoga instructor, attorney)?

1. Some people become very self-important and have no interest in correcting people’s overestimation of the tower height.I don’t know if they notice the inaccuracy or not, but they become in their eyes as important as their prior-perception.

2. Other people notice that it’s not as impressive as they once thought, and adjust their perspective accordingly.

3. Finally, some people think the tower is still really tall, and they must just be an imposter. (i.e. “the other people must be as smart as I thought they were before I got into this profession, but somehow I managed to sneak in”). I think that is where career imposter syndrome comes from.

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Here’s the thing, though. In order for a profession to very effectively over-inflate perceived value relative to actual value, it kind of needs its members to buy into it. i.e., it needs a lot of people like I describe in 1. I guess this happens naturally, because most people enjoy being admired. However, I wonder what things can be done to deceive people about their own intelligence & skills. How do professional organizations accomplish this? What are effective methods?

Is putting up more hurdles and making the profession more exclusive enough? Can people tell the difference between “there were a lot of hurdles but most people could jump them if they wanted to” and “this is extremely difficult and you need unusual skills”?

How good stories ruin our brains: Emily Rosa case study

Until today I hadn’t heard of the story of Emily Rosa. Quoting wikipedia: “At age nine Rosa conceived and executed a scientific study of therapeutic touch which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998.” She won the James Randi “Skeptic of the Year” award in 1998. She received a great deal of media attention after publication of the article.

My first thoughts were: “That’s really cool. I love it that she did an experiment and got it published!” Then I read the article.

I have never read an article more littered with errors. Almost every statement in it related to statistics is wrong.

The basic experiment was described in the abstract:

therapists were “tested under blinded conditions to determine whether they could correctly identify which of their hands was closest to the investigator’s hand. Placement of the investigator’s hand was determined by flipping a coin. […] In 1996, 15 practitioners were tested at their homes or offices on different days for a period of several months. In 1997, 13 practitioners, including 7 from the first series [my emphasis], were tested in a single day.”

Despite the repeated measures design (some practitioners were tested 10 times, others were tested 20 times), the data appear to have been analyzed as if they were independent trials (although it’s hard to tell what they actually did, because the description of the methods is so terrible).

They did a one-sided test and failed to reject the null. However, the therapists did worse than would be expected with random guessing (44% success rate with p-value of about 0.04 (I can’t give a precise p-value because it’s impossible to reconstruct their data)). It could be just chance that they performed worse than you’d expect if they were just guessing, but it does suggest that something might be going on (was the experimenter tipping them off in the wrong direction in some way? were they really sensing a difference in what they feel but attributed it to the wrong thing?). None of that was discussed.

It would take me too long to list all of the errors and potential sources of bias. But trust me, it’s that bad.

I get that a child is one of the authors and it’s cute and we could provide them some slack. But the JAMA editors could have helped make the paper better.

Most importantly, I am extremely disappointed in my fellow skeptics. They let a sensational story blind them. It’s a story that has all of the elements needed to go viral. A 9 year old took on those pseudoscientists and won! Yay us! So then the skeptic community turned off their skeptical brains and just endorsed the whole story. Shame.

Of mice and parking tickets

Think of your house as a cell, with membranes (walls, roof, windows) and channels (doors, pipes, windows). You’re the immune system of this cell. In general this cell is quite appealing to other living things, due to temperature regulation and sources of food. Most of what makes it through your house’s membranes (via channels) will go undetected. However, sometimes you will detect unwanted invaders. For example, mice might go undetected for a while, but eventually you might notice mice feces or that they’ve eaten food you’ve left out.

You could ignore the mice, but to some degree that is only inviting more mice. In addition, most people don’t want mice in their houses (or bugs, but we’ll stick to the mice example). Another option is to try to kill the mice. However, mice are cute! You will probably feel mean if you kill them. Instead, you could catch them and let them go outside. How sweet.

Consider the letting them go scenario. The mice will likely either die or find another home. If they find another home, someone else is stuck with deciding between killing them or catching them and letting them go. You have basically passed the problem on to someone else. The mice will likely still die (either from cold, starvation or a mouse trap). However,  you get to feel like a good person.

Every system has membranes, channels and immune systems to patrol for intruders. This appears to be a universe universal (or, literally universal). Attaching morality to it is a difficult, questionable business.

I see this pattern a lot, where people make something someone else’s problem and look down on them while feeling good about themselves.

Think about many of the jobs that seem very unpleasant. As an example, consider the people whose job it is to write parking tickets in large cities. Parking meters are intended to prevent people from parking in one spot for a long time. Because of this, when you drive to a city, you are far more likely to find an available parking spot. Someone needs to enforce the parking meter rules, or people would just park there for long periods of time. If you like this system, then you should be thankful for the people who write parking tickets. However, I see a lot of anger directed at them. Of course it doesn’t feel good to get a parking ticket, but getting angry at them only makes their job worse. I think most people want parking meter enforcement, except when they get a ticket. The people who have better job options don’t have to write parking tickets to pay their bills. They can reap the benefits of parking meter enforcement, while acting morally superior to the people who do take on these jobs. It’s like making mice someone else’s problem, and then judging them if they kill them.

 

 

Authoritative communication: linking claims with status

I ‘ve noticed that people tend to be more likely to believe someone when they make a claim using an authoritative communication style. I’ve also noticed that I am less likely to correct their objectively false claims.

What I mean by authoritative is that someone makes a claim with extreme confidence, as displayed by their body language, tone of voice, and the statement itself. This is in contrast to someone who makes a statement where they make it clear that they aren’t certain it’s correct, and that they are open to discussion.

The authoritative person links the claim with their status — you cannot challenge one without the other. I find it stressful to challenge someone’s status, and am therefore less likely to respond. I would really like to discuss the claim without challenging the status, but that doesn’t seem possible.

By not challenging them, however, I have done nothing to reduce the amount of unjustified authority in the world. I wonder the degree to which this is why confident people who are less competent often get further ahead in the corporate world (assuming that’s true).

Argument by analogy in debates is an epistemic sin

In Beverly Hills 90210, Donna Martin responded to critics of a plan to have condom machines in the high school:

It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?

And Donna Martin drops the mic.

How can one respond to that? You don’t want to take a chance that kids will drown, do you?

The analogy is powerful because everyone has heard about kids who drowned in pools. It is really disturbing to think about, especially given our desire to protect children. It hits the right emotions that prevent most people from being able to look critically at it. For this reason it’s both an effective strategy, if well-executed, and harmful to those who hoped the debate would lead to better policy. I feel like this strategy is so effective and so awful that Schopenhauer should have featured it in his list of ways to win an argument.

However, there are effective ways to respond to these cheap emotional analogies.

Send an analogy back in return

One strategy is to use the same analogy to make a different argument — one that is unpopular. That will show flaws in the argument.

For example, when I was in high school there was an official school-sanctioned ‘smoking area’ on school grounds. The Principal argued that kids will smoke anyway, but if they’re not allowed to smoke outside they will smoke in the bathroom and damage school property. You don’t want school property damaged, do you? Sure, you can tell kids not to smoke, but we know that they will anyway. If you know they’re going to swim, shouldn’t you give them a safe place to do it?

Another strategy is to come up with an absurd example that follows the same line of logic. In this case you could argue:

We can tell kids to not use pot. But we know many of them will anyway. And if they are buying it from their friends, who knows what it will be laced with. Therefore, there should be marijuana dispensers at school.

Finally, you could use exactly the same argument, but change one thing to make it seem absurd. You could in this example argue for condom machines in restrooms at businesses.

It’s against company policy for people to have sex in their offices. However, we know office sex takes place anyway, and STIs are a real problem. Shouldn’t we at least make it easier for people to be safe? It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?

Pick it apart

Another, but probably less effective, strategy is to point out specific (hidden-ish) assumptions. It’s helpful if you can relate it to the analogy.

For example, you could argue that a condom machine doesn’t teach kids how to have safe sex, so it’s not like teaching kids to swim. It’s more like making a life preserver available at a location far away from the pool (since most kids don’t have sex at school).

You could also point out that the analogy is based on the assumption that making condoms available will decrease the number of instances of unprotected sex. However, condoms available in schools could feel like an endorsement. That could affect the total number of sexual encounters in a given year (either positively or negatively). Even if condom availability increased the rate of condom use, if it also increased the number of sexual encounters then it’s possible there could be more instances of unprotected sex. In other words, if it lead to an increase in the number of sexual encounters, that’s like building more pools.

Conversations

Communication is sometimes primarily tribal, sometimes primarily social (in other ways — e.g. friendly small talk, conversations about family), and sometimes primarily about knowledge (academic, logistical, etc). If you respond to a primarily tribal sentence with a primarily knowledge point, your sentence will be interpreted tribally (because it has already been established that this is a tribal conversation). If you start a knowledge conversation and somebody responds tribally, their tribal language will likely be judged based on its accuracy.

For example, if terrorists are described as cowards, that’s a tribal conversation. If you respond by saying “terrorists are terrible people, but I don’t necessarily think they’re cowards,” it will be interpreted as you defending terrorists (because it was a tribal conversation, so everything you say will be interpreted as either with or against).

If your liberal friends excitedly tell you about the ‘bold’ speech at the academy awards, that’s a tribal conversation. If you respond by questioning whether it is really bold to express liberal ideas to a liberal audience, in tribal language that means “I don’t support the cause.”

Now imagine that you were having a very non-tribal discussion about the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage, with the goal of really coming to a better understanding about the topic. If someone responds with a joke about how democrats just want to make sure that no one is rich, it would be interpreted as “I’m not smart enough to contribute anything meaningful to this conversation.”

Most people, whether consciously or not, know what type of conversation is taking place and interpret everything in that context. In general, however, I think it’s always easier to shift the conversation from knowledge->social->tribal than in the other direction. Jumping from tribal to knowledge is the worst offense.

Outrage speed

tl;dr Getting outraged quickly has more social reward and less risk than patiently withholding judgment while waiting for evidence

Consider the recent tragic event in North Carolina, where an atheist murdered 3 muslims. When essentially the only facts we knew were that an atheist shot and killed 3 muslims in their home, people were very quick to let everyone know (a) that the victims were murdered strictly because of their religion (I saw it compared to the Charlie Hebdo attack); (b) that all of the people who have been saying Islam uniquely inspires violence have been proven wrong and need to apologize; and (c) the media are biased against muslims and their lack of coverage of this proves it.

Now that more evidence is in, it looks like the murder was at least partially over a parking dispute. It is certainly possible that religion played a role, perhaps a major one. That is something I don’t know. But from the beginning it was always possible that this wasn’t motivated by his dislike of religion. And if that turned out to be the case, wouldn’t the people who rushed to judgment look bad? So why would they do it?

I’ll provide an answer to that question in a minute. But first, I just want to point out that people do this all across the political spectrum. Politically charged outrage flies across twitter the minute we hear of some event that, if the facts pan out, would be outrageous to some group of people.

So why rush to judgement?

If you are the first person in your social group to find the story and express outrage, you really stand out as being passionate about this cause. If, instead, you try to plug the outrage megaphone by suggesting that people wait for more facts, you look way less committed.

Consider the two scenarios:

1. The facts end up backing up the story. In that case, the first person to express outrage really wins. They showed passion and commitment, and they were right. The hesitant person can try to join the crowd, but they just don’t seem as devoted.

2. The facts do not back up the story. The first person to express outrage will say something like “well, in this particular case it might not have been true, but my main point still holds.” The hesitant person sort of has a minor victory, but who is going to celebrate with them? Their in-group isn’t happy about this outcome, because it made them look bad.

The risk-reward really seems to favor expressing outrage quickly and decisively.

As an aside, this argument reminds me a lot of a point Scott Alexander made about pedophilia

..you gain the most status if you go the furthest attacking pedophilia, if you can separate yourself from the pack by attacking it more, if you can say “My opponents think this marginal case is okay, but I am so against pedophilia that I oppose even the marginal cases” so on even further into the margin. And it’s really hard to say “Okay, you’ve gone too far with the attacks on pedophilia“, because then the other person can just say “I notice my worthy opponent is trying to defend pedophilia” and you lose whatever debate you were having.

There is gain and not much penalty in being outraged the fastest. Who in your in-group is going to say “I think you got outraged too quickly?”