Posts

Sorted by New

Wiki Contributions

Comments

I want to make 
1) A general compliment for the post. 
I think the tables are helpful for those who seek to recognize their biases. Bravo!
2) A comment about the 3% of the 3B1B video. 
Thinking about the audience is crucial for communication. I think the video has reached much more than the 3% of its target audience.
3) A meta-comment N1 on communication.
When communicating, it is useful to know why you are doing it (also for other activities). If one wants to make the broad population aware of cognitive biases, one should know why and consider the marginal added value of the educational activity.
4) A meta-comment N2 on communication. 
I believe communication is most efficient when one understands the motives of the target audience and through communication provides support for the achievement of those motives. 
E.g. Situation: my co-authors are angry with the referee who criticized our manuscript as too implicit. I might, step 1) focus on making the best effort to resubmit the paper, thus putting explicitly the motivation for action 
step 2) make them aware of the transparency bias, on the example of how the manuscript can be written more clearly, thus introducing action(rewriting) that is aligned with the motivation (resubmission). 
Note in the example above, the educational part comes as a side-effect. One might be explicit about overcoming the biases to solidify the educational effect.

To recap, we should have the interests of our audience in mind. Moreover, if we do not act in the interest of the audience we risk triggering their defensive mode and thus make our efforts futile if not harmful

4-bis) A meta-comment on meta-comment N2. 
One might say that scalability is important (e.g. for Raising the Sanity Waterline) and that knowing one's audience is not scalable.
In other words, it's too costly to "educate" one person at a time.
I think this is not always true, there are motivations that are common across the population. Distilling those motives might be extremely useful for communication. Understanding which biases an "average Joe" is facing in his primary activities might be the most efficient way to "educate" the population on implicit biases.
E.g. I imagine a hypothetical video titled "How to actually get rich instead of fooling yourself" might be an example.

P.S. This is my first comment on LW, so "hello world". It looks longish - if you think multiple comments is a better format, please let me know.