As you probably know, I’m deeply obsessed with bias, and have been trying to advocate for shifting our thinking about biases away from “annoying brain bugs” and towards “unavoidable constraints to our thinking” for a few years. Explaining exactly what that means has always been a challenge, to say the least. Almost 3 years after the first cognitive bias cheat sheet post was published, I think I finally have an answer to what we can do about our bias.
I published a Medium article titled What Can We Do About Our Bias, but you’re not a Medium subscriber, don’t worry… this friend link should enable you to still be able to read the post.
The post describes a 4-step roadmap for developing an always-on, honest relationship to bias.
Also! Substack (that I publish this newsletter through) just happened to launch discussion threads today, so if you have feedback, questions, or thoughts about this new post, click through and ask away. I will answer every question submitted within the next 24 hours as honestly as I can.
Commenting as I read for the first time (so I may query things that you explain later, however that may be useful for you as regards the order of presentation):
1) "check whether A) you’re really in existential danger right now" -- this is without context. You've done nothing to associate the idea of spotting a bias with the idea of spotting an existential danger. I guess the connection is that biases "trigger" people in ways that only "existential danger" should (but don't say "existential" it's totally overused and even mild danger should do the trick) but you haven't presented any illustrations of situations where that is/isn't appropriate so this line doesn't really connect...
2) "look into it and identify people and ideas that may have been undervalued or harmed by you and others. Look for ways to reverse that trend and repair damage." -- I would recommend only looking for damage that you personally (or maybe your most immediate associates) have done, trying to spot and correct the bias of the world would be an never ending task (and a rich source of extra biases as you try to apply "positive bias" to oppose negative, then overshoot, then over correct etc etc...)
The existence of communities who are painfully aware of the bias of other communities (but not their own :-)) and who try to correct other people's biases are part of the problem...
3) "actively seek out information and perspectives that challenge your own. Invite the best representatives of positions you don’t agree with to productive disagreements. Actively attempt to falsify your own beliefs." -- is this good advice? For confrontational people (who are going to be in conflict anyway and may as well make the conflict productive), maybe it is...
But I'd say for a lot of people accepting there are things they don't know and don't need an opinion on would also be very healthy.
Example: You are worried about migrants taking jobs but you've never met one and they haven't taken a job from anyone you know. Trying to get back to the place where you don't think about "migrants" at all would be healthy (elsewhere there might be real conflict between migrants and previous inhabitants, but your problem is you're concerned about what is for you, a non-issue. Any real confrontation is actually a smaller problem somewhere else...)
4) 13 strategies -- I think you may have a potential miscommunication here, "strategies" feels like ways of countering bias, not causes of it. The difficulty is finding a better word that's not highly specialist (my first thought was "heuristic") Maybe "coping strategy" (because that's got the feeling of being a "making do" rather than a definitively correct action). Or "adaptation" which is 100% correct in the evolutionary sense, but possibly wrong in the sense of "local change"...? How about "short cut" since that is what these really are, short cuts to getting by without perfect data or processing?
5) as phrased, 3 isn't a strategy it's a symptom - the strategy is breaking the data mass into its bulk and its outliers (so what we pay attention to is (i) the average cases, and (ii) the exceptional cases), and this has a side-effect of drawing attention to the really odd cases (although it can also have the opposite effect: if there is a "halo" of outliers, we can dismiss them all as "and then there are the weird cases" - which is strategy 5; so 3 and 5 may be opposite sides of the same coin...)
6) aren't strategies 3 and 4 not different phrasing of the same thing? "bizarre" and "novel" both mean "unusual for some context"...
7) "We are overconfident in everything we do." -- is this true for the general "we"? There are overconfident people, and they are always overconfident and they cause a lot of damage, then there are people with imposter syndrome, who are unreasonably under confident about everything...
Do you rather mean "we ascribe too much confidence to opinions on things we know little about"? It's not snappy, but for me it seems more true...
8) "Let’s use the example of the upcoming 2020 presidential election to see how each of these strategies could impact how we decide who to vote for." -- this really sounds as if the strategies are something the reader wants to deliberately deploy, rather than something they may unconsciously suffer from...
9) 13 blind spots -- to be honest, by now I am beginning to glaze over a bit, maybe it would be a good principle to have at most _one_ numbered list of take-home messages?
Hi Buster, I love you original viewpoint on this subject. My question is, how do you assemble your list of biases? Wikipedia only shows some of the ones you reference. Others seem to be listed as fallacies, and others, such as Chesterton's fence and Cathedral effect, seem to be found randomly but are highly relevant to the field. Are you just well read or is there an authoritative source that you would recommend to further research a complete list?
I love these 13 strategies! Beyond the Pocket Biases app + lovely poster, if you were to create a de-biasing academy (say for leaders in different orgs or VCs who get paid to make good decisions) how might you go about training these mental muscles of opt-in / observing / repairing / normalising?
i.e. I could imagine guided meditations to take them through this process, or perhaps creating a discussion format where the group could discuss one person's decision retrospectively through these lenses.
There's an entire science / discipline associated with aircraft accidents and human error. What is Buster's reading list and opinion about the field of Human error assessment as it relates to aircraft accidents?
Commenting as I read for the first time (so I may query things that you explain later, however that may be useful for you as regards the order of presentation):
1) "check whether A) you’re really in existential danger right now" -- this is without context. You've done nothing to associate the idea of spotting a bias with the idea of spotting an existential danger. I guess the connection is that biases "trigger" people in ways that only "existential danger" should (but don't say "existential" it's totally overused and even mild danger should do the trick) but you haven't presented any illustrations of situations where that is/isn't appropriate so this line doesn't really connect...
2) "look into it and identify people and ideas that may have been undervalued or harmed by you and others. Look for ways to reverse that trend and repair damage." -- I would recommend only looking for damage that you personally (or maybe your most immediate associates) have done, trying to spot and correct the bias of the world would be an never ending task (and a rich source of extra biases as you try to apply "positive bias" to oppose negative, then overshoot, then over correct etc etc...)
The existence of communities who are painfully aware of the bias of other communities (but not their own :-)) and who try to correct other people's biases are part of the problem...
3) "actively seek out information and perspectives that challenge your own. Invite the best representatives of positions you don’t agree with to productive disagreements. Actively attempt to falsify your own beliefs." -- is this good advice? For confrontational people (who are going to be in conflict anyway and may as well make the conflict productive), maybe it is...
But I'd say for a lot of people accepting there are things they don't know and don't need an opinion on would also be very healthy.
Example: You are worried about migrants taking jobs but you've never met one and they haven't taken a job from anyone you know. Trying to get back to the place where you don't think about "migrants" at all would be healthy (elsewhere there might be real conflict between migrants and previous inhabitants, but your problem is you're concerned about what is for you, a non-issue. Any real confrontation is actually a smaller problem somewhere else...)
4) 13 strategies -- I think you may have a potential miscommunication here, "strategies" feels like ways of countering bias, not causes of it. The difficulty is finding a better word that's not highly specialist (my first thought was "heuristic") Maybe "coping strategy" (because that's got the feeling of being a "making do" rather than a definitively correct action). Or "adaptation" which is 100% correct in the evolutionary sense, but possibly wrong in the sense of "local change"...? How about "short cut" since that is what these really are, short cuts to getting by without perfect data or processing?
5) as phrased, 3 isn't a strategy it's a symptom - the strategy is breaking the data mass into its bulk and its outliers (so what we pay attention to is (i) the average cases, and (ii) the exceptional cases), and this has a side-effect of drawing attention to the really odd cases (although it can also have the opposite effect: if there is a "halo" of outliers, we can dismiss them all as "and then there are the weird cases" - which is strategy 5; so 3 and 5 may be opposite sides of the same coin...)
6) aren't strategies 3 and 4 not different phrasing of the same thing? "bizarre" and "novel" both mean "unusual for some context"...
7) "We are overconfident in everything we do." -- is this true for the general "we"? There are overconfident people, and they are always overconfident and they cause a lot of damage, then there are people with imposter syndrome, who are unreasonably under confident about everything...
Do you rather mean "we ascribe too much confidence to opinions on things we know little about"? It's not snappy, but for me it seems more true...
8) "Let’s use the example of the upcoming 2020 presidential election to see how each of these strategies could impact how we decide who to vote for." -- this really sounds as if the strategies are something the reader wants to deliberately deploy, rather than something they may unconsciously suffer from...
9) 13 blind spots -- to be honest, by now I am beginning to glaze over a bit, maybe it would be a good principle to have at most _one_ numbered list of take-home messages?
Hi Buster, I love you original viewpoint on this subject. My question is, how do you assemble your list of biases? Wikipedia only shows some of the ones you reference. Others seem to be listed as fallacies, and others, such as Chesterton's fence and Cathedral effect, seem to be found randomly but are highly relevant to the field. Are you just well read or is there an authoritative source that you would recommend to further research a complete list?
I love these 13 strategies! Beyond the Pocket Biases app + lovely poster, if you were to create a de-biasing academy (say for leaders in different orgs or VCs who get paid to make good decisions) how might you go about training these mental muscles of opt-in / observing / repairing / normalising?
i.e. I could imagine guided meditations to take them through this process, or perhaps creating a discussion format where the group could discuss one person's decision retrospectively through these lenses.
There's an entire science / discipline associated with aircraft accidents and human error. What is Buster's reading list and opinion about the field of Human error assessment as it relates to aircraft accidents?