Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Strategies to correct for overconfidence, systematic biases & even academic feuding

#1
C C Offline
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ju...-interview

EXCERPT: [...] What’s fascinating is that Kahneman’s work explicitly swims against the current of human thought. Not even he believes that the various flaws that bedevil decision-making can be successfully corrected. The most damaging of these is overconfidence: the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite. It is the bias he says he would most like to eliminate if he had a magic wand. But it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things”. The same applies to our habit of predicting stereotypical outcomes at the expense of what’s known about the world. [...]

The next problem on his list is “noise”, or random variability: the fact that different people in the same situation make very different judgments. Random error is a very different phenomenon from the systematic biases he’s been studying for several decades. It’s the kind of error you can’t reliably predict. Noise, he says, applies to people approving loans, to underwriters, to radiologists. One worker might be more optimistic than another, say, and it becomes difficult to ensure uniformity. “Mood is noxious. Noise is costly to organisations, which are essentially factories for making decisions. If another underwriter had seen that case he would put a different premium on it …”

[...] Kahneman is interested in looking at how to increase the consistency of operations – not the same, he explains, as controlling biases. It sounds like a new and fascinating chapter. And when he decides to write it, one thing is now certain – he can count on millions of readers....
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Smartphones are lowering student’s grades, study finds (academic performance data) C C 4 335 Aug 19, 2020 08:41 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Is religion a universal in human culture or an academic invention? (data organizing) C C 0 236 Aug 15, 2018 06:40 PM
Last Post: C C
  The trouble with scientists: Tackling human biases in science C C 1 672 May 21, 2015 06:25 PM
Last Post: Yazata



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)