Targets and priors, fallacies, biases and heuristics
Some Daniel Kahneman Quotes:
We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.
We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.
Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.
What you see is all there is.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.
A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.
from https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1773016425394782555.html?utm_campaign=topunroll
**
Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action.
The study of heuristics in human decision-making was developed in the 1970s and the 1980s, by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman,[8] although the concept had been originally introduced by the Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon. Simon's original primary object of research was problem solving that showed that we operate within what he calls bounded rationality. He coined the term satisficing, which denotes a situation in which people seek solutions, or accept choices or judgements, that are "good enough" for their purposes although they could be optimised.[9]
Rudolf Groner analysed the history of heuristics from its roots in ancient Greece up to contemporary work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence,[10] proposing a cognitive style "heuristic versus algorithmic thinking", which can be assessed by means of a validated questionnaire.[11]
Heuristics – such as the recognition heuristic, the take-the-best heuristic and fast-and-frugal trees – have been shown to be effective in predictions, particularly in situations of uncertainty. It is often said that heuristics trade accuracy for effort but this is only the case in situations of risk. Risk refers to situations where all possible actions, their outcomes and probabilities are known. In the absence of this information, that is under uncertainty, heuristics can achieve higher accuracy with lower effort.[14] This finding, known as a less-is-more effect, would not have been found without formal models. The valuable insight of this program is that heuristics are effective not despite their simplicity – but because of it.
**
Are married men happier?
Do married men earn more?
Does fasting increase your risk of heart attack?
https://www.statnews.com/2024/03/19/intermittent-fasting-study-heart-risk/
Is a school uniform better? Will it reduce bullying? Will it make society more equal?
from ACX
26: Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend, historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.
Does breastfeeding make babies more intelligent?
Does Vitamin D make you healthier?
Should a country with a state religion separation give Xmas and Easter holidays?
Is being overweight bad for your health?
So many problems, so few answers.
List of formal models of heuristics
Elimination by aspects heuristic
Tallying
also
also
also[edit]
survivor bias
Here’s how to tell how fit you are-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2024/fitness-test-by-age-exercise/
and how long you will live- but if you do these exercises every day, will you live longer?
or will you just train yourself to be better at these exercises?
People who take vitamin supplements are healthier than people who don’t but if you do a trial, will the 50% who take vitamins get “healthier”? How can you measure health? With the exercises above?
Goodhart’s Law
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Also, can we compare men with women?
“Many of the medicines we take -- common drugs like Ambien and everyday aspirin -- were only ever tested on men. And the unknown side effects for women can be dangerous, even deadly. Alyson McGregor studies the differences between male and female patients; in this fascinating talk she explains how the male model became our framework for medical research ... and what women and men need to ask their doctors to get the right care for their bodies.”
https://www.ted.com/talks/alyson_mcgregor_why_medicine_often_has_dangerous_side_effects_for_women
https://www.ted.com/talks/cassie_dionne_it_s_time_to_talk_about_women_s_health
Plus, as Scott Alexander points out here, sometimes the methodology is dodgy:
“In the US, more blacks than whites have gotten coronavirus. But this could be because of Vitamin D, or because of wealth/education disparities. One easy way to check this is to look at Asians. Despite their superficially lighter skin, they have Vitamin D deficiencies almost as bad as blacks. But on average they're better-off and better-educated than whites. If blacks' problem was Vitamin D, we would expect Asians to do worse than whites; if it was wealth and education, we'd expect them to do better. In fact, it's a mix. They get coronavirus only about half as often as whites, but they do worse once they get it. This suggests that maybe blacks are are getting the virus more because of wealth/education disparities, but doing worse once they get it because of something that might be Vitamin D? So maybe Vitamin D is involved in severity, but not overall infection risk? We'll come back to this.
If blacks get coronavirus more often because of socioeconomic reasons, and also have lower Vitamin D, anybody looking at coronavirus infection rate without adjusting for race is suspect. Merzon and the Israelis didn't control for race (and Israel is quite racially diverse). Kaufman and the Quest team say they adjusted for race, but if you look at their paper, they didn't have access to race data for any participants, so instead they looked at what zip code they were in, coded it as majority-black or majority-white or whatever, and adjusted for that. I live in a majority black zip code, so apparently I'm black now. And my lived experience as a person of color, which I hear is more trustworthy than any scientific study, tells me this is a big enough loophole to invalidate the entire paper. When white people in majority black zip codes have enough money/education to avoid the coronavirus more effectively than real black people, and also have higher Vitamin D because of their lighter skin color, the paper’s metholodogy is going to mistake this for Vitamin D preventing coronavirus.”
fallacies
from http://malingual.blogspot.fr
ev based efl
Logical fallacies, biases and heuristics
A lot of what I write about involves logical fallacies, biases or heuristics. This is a guide with more detail about each one and how they relate to language and language teaching. I'll expand on it as and when...
1. Argument from popularity (Argumentum ad populum)
Basically put, "everyone is doing it so it must be good/effective. Thus everyone does learning styles and it's in all the books, so there must be something to it.
The unpleasant feeling we get when our beliefs and reality collide. For example we may think we are wonderful teachers, loved by our students, only to get crappy feedback at the end of the course.Cognitive dissonance must be resolved and this is usually through some kind of excuse 'well, these students wouldn't know good teaching if it jumped up and bit them'. etc
The tendency to attribute positive characteristics to someone with a positive attribute. An example in teaching might be assuming an attractive student would be more honest and thus less likely to cheat on a paper. Another example (of the reverse halo effect) would judging a less attractive students work more harshly. The Halo effect has been demonstrated in sentence lengths of convicts and is a compelling reason for blind marking and assessment where possible.
EDIT: the Halo effect might also explain why good looking teachers tend to get better feedback than plainer folk.
Famous TEFLer 'so and so said this is good so I'd better do it. Regardless of who said it you should always ask "is it true" and "how do they know?" more info here.
5. Ad Hominem (to the man)
Attacking a person rather than an idea. For example, 'EBEFL is an idiot so I wouldn't take his views on pseudo-science seriously.' EBEFL may indeed be an idiot but that doesn't mean his ideas are wrong in this case. Attack ideas, not people.
The tendency humans have to take more notice of information which agrees with their beliefs and forget about that which doesn't. Also how most EFL methods become successful, "how do I know NLP works, I can see it on my student's faces" More info here.
The idea that something isn't true because of where it comes from. For example drilling is from audiolingualism so drilling must be useless. It doesn't matter where an idea comes from but only whether it is true or not.
The idea that a word's meaning should never change. For instance 'decimate' orignally meant 'kill one in 10' and so people who use it to mean 'destroy' are wrong. Words can change their meaning and oddly people who argue in this way are very selective about which words they want to retain their original meanings.