How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think
invertedpassion.com
invertedpassion.com
The 2nd framing is awkward. I am no marketing expert but it seems the non-awkward one will be only 20% Fat
> Hack #4: Watch out if you are happy about a decision
The advice here is - if you are giddy about the idea, google a contrarian view. So, how does someone actually become happy or excited about his/her idea?
Great point.
>The advice here is - if you are giddy about the idea, google a contrarian view. So, how does someone actually become happy or excited about his/her idea?
In my personal experience, I haven't found any correlation between giddiness about an idea and it being right or effective. (Especially with startup ideas). So I watch out for excitement about an idea, write out why it would fail, wait for a couple of days and revisit it. If I'm still excited, I pursue it.
I describe myself as a "slowpoke" when it comes to reasoning my way through certain subject matter, notably politics. I am certainly willing to change my opinions, but I might not change them right away based on a single argument. You might have to wait a year, or a decade, for me to decide.
I love the way you phrase it. It's a wild hypothesis but I suspect that good (Bayesian style of) thinking requires metabolic energy in our brain that's a magnitude of order or more as compared to intuitive A -> B style of thinking. This is why perhaps our brains avoids the former.
I agree, but that doesn't really alter the author's point: Saying '80% fat free' is likely to sell better than 'only 20% fat'.
Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point: When a medical operation was described as having a 90% survival rate two thirds of doctors recommended the procedure. When it was described as having a 10% mortality rate only a third of doctors recommended the procedure.
The System I/System II narrative is an old idea that can be quite convincing, and it's not without merits, but one might wonder if all its appeal doesn't call for a suggestion of the original post: watch if you are happy with a belief/theory.
EDIT:fixed my double negative
ex: the gambler's fallacy is mostly a fallacy if events are i.i.d, which often isn't the case in real life situations.
many are labeled as a "bias" once we make the observation that it failed us. but of course we should try to optimize regardless.
this is tangentially related: https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroye...
Lower than 1%. I'm a guy.
Though this would have a similar issue for anyone who isn't a 40-50 year old woman.
On a more serious note, I feel that trap should set off alarm bells for anyone who has taken a statistics course.
The more dangerous fallacy along the same lines is that probabilities often brings up intransitive. There can be three medicines: A,B, and C that in a sense A > B and B > C, but C > A. This type of issue can really sneak up on you.
Yes, but the problem is that most physicians get it wrong. That's what worries me.
I agree that the mammogram problem is a bit artificial, but like you say similar problems come up in different forms. It's often not that people have less cognitive abilities (doctors _are_ intelligent), it's just that their intuition convinces them the answer they have in mind is the right one.
There's a related research that showed that a similar problem given in _less_ legible font has less cognitive errors: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-v...
Lower than 1%. I'm a guy.
Men get breast cancer, and those who do are more likely to die from it than women who do.