Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Caveat: In this context, "confident" means "updates their belief less after learning the group opinion" -- i.e. continues to believe what they did before even after knowing the group disagrees.

EDIT: per klochner's correction, the following is wrong, and they did get a monetary incentive, though it's not mentioned in the linked article (only the paper), which is a pretty significant difference!

Note that they did not provide a material incentive for accurate guesses, so I'm honestly surprised that this kind of confidence correlates with correctness. It requires that this feeling of confidence is more likely to happen in people who really do know better compared to those two don't know better. (Per the writeup, if you weight each guess in the average by confidence per this metric, then you get even more accurate answers than the simple mean).

Subjects received monetary payments for each good estimate. Possible rewards were 4, 2, or 1 points if their estimates fell into the 10%, 20%, or 40% intervals around the truth; otherwise, they received no points. The rewards applied to all rounds to make sure that individuals took all of their decisions seriously. The correct answer and the rewards for all five estimates were only disclosed to the subjects after the fifth estimate. This reward structure in- troduced incentives only to find the truth and avoided incentives to conform with others. Furthermore, there were no incentives for strategic considerations. For example, there was no benefit of being better than others or of misleading others, because this did not affect individuals ’ payments. There was also no possibility to help others by deviating from the strategy to find the best estimate. Therefore, our experimental design put subjects into a situation in which they would try to get as close to the truth as possible by using their own knowledge and the estimates of others.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full...

Thanks for the correction -- for some reason, this isn't mentioned in the story, which is a pretty big omission.

basically this is saying the entire story is pretty much bunk. Its more than a significant omission, it invalidates the entire analysis presented.

Seems to me you're proving the point of the article. Rather than contributing independent critical thinking, you're more motivated to pile onto the comments of others, to the point of not even bothering to understand the comment you're piling onto.

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