Why We’re Biased About Being Biased | Hacker News Reader

Why We’re Biased About Being Biased

nautil.us

60 pointsdnetesn15 comments

> The “moral credential effect” describes this compensation in the context of moral reasoning. When study subjects were given an opportunity to disagree with sexist statements, for example, they were then more likely to favor giving a stereotypically male job to a man instead of a woman (compared to people who weren’t exposed to the statements). Likewise, people who believed they were morally good were more likely to cheat on a math test.

That's interesting. It means that if we want social justice, the last thing we should do is make people feel that they need to take public stands for it.

I took a look at the referenced paper the nautilus article cites, and it is extremely poorly designed, to the point of being near useless to make any sorts of conclusions and definitely not good enough to create any sort of social justice policies.

Not surprising, considering it's a psychology paper, but still.

There are 19 research references on the moral credential effect [1] and self licensing [2] on their respective wikipedia pages. It might be a bit of work to go through all of them looking for disqualifying flaws. Maybe we can assume they are ok tentatively?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_credential_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

I think the parent post was referring to the specific study regarding disagreeing with sexist statements -> favoring gender stereotypes in hiring. I don't think he was questioning the validity of the moral credential effect.

Social media gives a lot of people the platform to do this and some use it quite heavily. It would be interesting to see the correlation between something like "ferocity" on Facebook and real life actions.

I don't know if there are any studies about this but I don't see anything that would make it different. Social media gives us 24/7 opportunity to feel good being on the "right" side of an issue.

I wonder whether there's an inverse correlation between social media use and direct action on civic and social causes: writing a Congress person, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or giving to charities.

I took a different view.

I think this suggests that it's the kind of public stands that need to change (it's hard to imagine even having a civil rights movement without public stands).

Rather than hurling accusations at others (as seems to be the strategy on most forms of social media), we should focus on the common flaws we hold that could lead ourselves and others to discriminate against others on factors unrelated to their character.

Wikipedia has a pretty fascinating list of cognitive biases, it's fun to go through it and mark each that applies until you start looking for the bias about thinking you have all of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

That's the elusive meta-bias.

Of course you have all of them. Those are common patterns in human thinking, and I guess you are human (correct me if I'm wrong).

You just don't have all of them at the same time, and have more bias in some situations than in others.

I liked the graphic poster drawn up by Business Insider: http://uk.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-that-affect-d...

Here's the image directly to avoid potential paywall: https://static4.uk.businessinsider.com/image/56a111c8dd0895a...

All life forms are biased towards their own survival. That's why they're alive in the first place.

This is why AI practitioners will never make artificial human intelligence. It will be found to be way too bug ridden before the hard work (expense wrt power, computation, bandwidth) of getting it trained to a human level is completed.

To clarify, the emphasis there is on human. I don't doubt 50+ years from now we will have general purpose artificial intelligences as sharp as humans. They just won't be very human like. Typical heuristic errors like confirmation bias will be quantified and that's about as inhuman as it gets.

You've failed to account for the inevitability that general AI itself will be extremely interested in modeling human cognition.

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