Entry tags:

wetware hacking

Overcoming Bias
I've recently been introduced to a really fantastic website: Overcoming Bias.

My introduction to the website was in doing some research on project planning, and encountering the article titled "Planning Fallacy." The article starts with what is common knowledge amongst project managers: People are really bad at estimating how long something will take. It is actually a bit shocking just *how* bad we are at planning, however. When asked to estimate a best case, mean case, and worst case scenario; and then to perform the work in question--it usually takes longer to complete the task than the worst case scenario estimate!

From there, however, Overcoming Bias talks about what it is about our brains that causes us to be such poor planners. It deconstructs the problem by discussing what it is about our brains that make us unable to perceive reality.

This is generally the theme of the website. Our brains perceive reality in a particular (and therefor biased) way. We generally don't understand *how* it is that are brains are working, so we are prone to mistaking this bias for fact. The website explores this topic wherever it comes up, which turns out to be pretty much everywhere:

• An Alien God: If you were going to read one article on this website, this would be it. We found God, the Ghost in the Machine. It was so alien--so genuinely different from us--that we didn't recognize it.
• Fake Justification: The method by which we make a decision and the one we use to justify that decision are completely different. I've said before that "reasons are rationalizations." This is a much deeper exploration of that statement.
• Evolving to Extinction: The difference between the science of evolution and popular conception of evolution.
• Burdensome Details: It may well be we are so poor at planning because we are equally poor at probability. Probability is often counter intuitive, and when combining the probability of separate events, we assign cause & effect whereas probability doesn't. This mistake is exploitable in people--our brains are not perceiving reality.

This last one particularly touches on a subject that I currently have a lot of confusion about. Overcoming Bias is in many ways about reductionism. Shedding "high-level" details for "low-level" details, until you're down to atoms, quarks, or whatever it is that stuff is made of. But complexity--and our ability to work with complex systems--is extremely detail shy. We often perform better with less information. Details are paralyzing. But how do we reconcile these two positions?

I'm attracted to this site because it provides a framework for exploring the following topic, which I copied from a conversation on Slashdot many, many years ago:

Has Microsoft taken away your right to form a militia? Has Pepsi told you what religion to practice? Has Exxon tried to force you to harbor soldiers against your will?

No, but... They have used highly advanced social engineering to take advantage of the fact the people are sheep, and further bred and proliferated the sheep mentality. This leads to people not forming militias, homogeneously practicing religions, and accepting the pretense of authority of any central organization that is sufficiently proficient in the art. It's not really the use of force. It's something new that really only came of age in the 20 Century. I don't think that philosophers and political thinkers have come to grips with it yet, or even done a good job of identifying it, so it doesn't classify as a crime or oppression by most people's standards, yet. Maybe in 100 years, the behavior of Microsoft and Pepsi will be viewed as politically oppressive, and people will wonder with amazement as to why the people of 2001 just stood there and took it.

I think the recent history of our culture can be described as people and organizations with a highly developed sense of statistical outcomes and probability exerting an enormous influence on a vastly larger body of people that lack any appreciation for how their behaviours reliably conform to this space. We laugh at the idea that someone already predicted how we would behave, or consider ourselves the perpetual exception to the rule. The method by which we assign motivation to others we wouldn't think of applying to ourselves, and hence we are blind to our own complicity.

If it were an arms race, the weapons of manipulation (advertising, politics, &c) are far stronger than the defenses against it. The situation is so asymmetrical that we're don't even know we're being attacked. We're still searching for the right way to articulate the problem.

I see in this website a means of developing the kind of toolkit that rebalances this relationship. It is a means to understand at least as much about ourselves as those that manipulate us understand about us.

EDIT: Added one more link in the bullet list above.