How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think
invertedpassion.com
invertedpassion.com
The 2nd framing is awkward. I am no marketing expert but it seems the non-awkward one will be only 20% Fat
> Hack #4: Watch out if you are happy about a decision
The advice here is - if you are giddy about the idea, google a contrarian view. So, how does someone actually become happy or excited about his/her idea?
I agree, but that doesn't really alter the author's point: Saying '80% fat free' is likely to sell better than 'only 20% fat'.
Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point: When a medical operation was described as having a 90% survival rate two thirds of doctors recommended the procedure. When it was described as having a 10% mortality rate only a third of doctors recommended the procedure.
Great point.
>The advice here is - if you are giddy about the idea, google a contrarian view. So, how does someone actually become happy or excited about his/her idea?
In my personal experience, I haven't found any correlation between giddiness about an idea and it being right or effective. (Especially with startup ideas). So I watch out for excitement about an idea, write out why it would fail, wait for a couple of days and revisit it. If I'm still excited, I pursue it.
I describe myself as a "slowpoke" when it comes to reasoning my way through certain subject matter, notably politics. I am certainly willing to change my opinions, but I might not change them right away based on a single argument. You might have to wait a year, or a decade, for me to decide.
I love the way you phrase it. It's a wild hypothesis but I suspect that good (Bayesian style of) thinking requires metabolic energy in our brain that's a magnitude of order or more as compared to intuitive A -> B style of thinking. This is why perhaps our brains avoids the former.
The System I/System II narrative is an old idea that can be quite convincing, and it's not without merits, but one might wonder if all its appeal doesn't call for a suggestion of the original post: watch if you are happy with a belief/theory.
EDIT:fixed my double negative
ex: the gambler's fallacy is mostly a fallacy if events are i.i.d, which often isn't the case in real life situations.
many are labeled as a "bias" once we make the observation that it failed us. but of course we should try to optimize regardless.
this is tangentially related: https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroye...
Lower than 1%. I'm a guy.
Though this would have a similar issue for anyone who isn't a 40-50 year old woman.
On a more serious note, I feel that trap should set off alarm bells for anyone who has taken a statistics course.
The more dangerous fallacy along the same lines is that probabilities often brings up intransitive. There can be three medicines: A,B, and C that in a sense A > B and B > C, but C > A. This type of issue can really sneak up on you.
Lower than 1%. I'm a guy.
Men get breast cancer, and those who do are more likely to die from it than women who do.
Yes, but the problem is that most physicians get it wrong. That's what worries me.
I agree that the mammogram problem is a bit artificial, but like you say similar problems come up in different forms. It's often not that people have less cognitive abilities (doctors _are_ intelligent), it's just that their intuition convinces them the answer they have in mind is the right one.
There's a related research that showed that a similar problem given in _less_ legible font has less cognitive errors: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-v...