Open thread, Jan. 02 - Jan. 08, 2017

Seems quite different to me. D-K effect is "you overestimate how good you are at something", while what I describe does not even involve a belief that you are good at the specific thing, only that -- despite knowing nothing about it on the object level -- you still have the meta-level ability of estimating how difficult it is "in principle".

An example of what I meant would be a manager in an IT company, who has absolutely no idea what "fooing the bar" means, but feels quite certain that it shouldn't take more than three days, including the analysis and testing.

While an example of D-K would be someone who writes a horrible code, but believes to be the best programmer ever. (And after looking at other people's code, keeps the original conviction, because the parts of the code he understood he could obviously write too, and the parts of the code he didn't understand are obviously written wrong.)

I may be misunderstanding the connection with the availability heuristic, but it seems to me that you're correct, and this is more closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What Dunning and Kruger observed was that someone who is sufficiently incompetent at a task is unable to distinguish competent work from incompetent work, and is more likely to overestimate the quality of their own work compared to others, even after being presented with the work of others who are more competent. What Viliam is describing is the inability to see what makes a task difficult, due to unfamiliarity with what is necessary to complete that task competently. I can see how this might relate to the availability heuristic; if I ask myself "how hard is it to be a nurse?", I can readily think of encounters I've had with nurses where they did some (seemingly) simple task and moved on. This might give the illusion that the typical day at work for a nurse is a bunch of (seemingly) simple tasks with patients like me.

Indeed, "manager" was the example I had in mind while writing this.

Could you provide a simple linkage as to why the effect (less I know, easier it seems for the other specialized person) is a consequence of the availability bias?

I am not aware of a research; this is from personal experience. In my experience, it seems to help when instead of one big black box you describe the work to the management as multiple black boxes. For example, instead of "building an artificial intelligence" you split it into "making a user interface for the AI", "designing a database structure for the AI", "testing the AI", etc. Then, if the managers have an intuitive idea of how much an unknown work takes (e.g. three days per black box), they agree that the more black boxes there are, the more days it will take.

(On the other hand, this can also get horribly wrong if the managers -- by the virtue of "knowing" what the original black box consists of -- become overconfident in their understanding of the problem, and start giving you specific suggestions, such as to leave out some of the suggested smaller black boxes, because their labels don't feel important. Or inviting an external expert to solve one of the smaller black boxes as a thing separate from the rest of the problem, based on the manager's superficial understanding; so the expert will produce something irrelevant for your project in exchange for half of your budget, which you now have to include somehow and pretend to be grateful for it.)

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Slack

It's cool and active. message Elo if you want to get in.

fixed. I should stick to languages I actually speak.

This seems like one of the less credible Umeshisms.

Suppose that at the margin you can get to the airport one minute later on average at the cost of a probability p of missing your plane. Then you should do this if U(one minute at home instead of at airport) > -p U(missing plane). That's not obviously the case. Is it?

The argument might be that if you never miss a plane then your current plane-missing probability is zero, and therefore you're in the "safe" region, and it's very unlikely that you're right on the boundary of the safe region, so you can afford to move a little in the unsafe direction. But this is rubbish; all that "I never miss a plane" tells you is a rough upper bound on how likely you are to miss a plane, and if you don't fly an awful lot this might be a very crude upper bound; and depending on those U() values even a rather small extra chance of missing the plane might be (anti-)worth a lot more to you than a few extra minutes spent at home.

(A couple of other fiddly details, both of which also argue against arriving later at the airport. First, you may be happier when you leave more margin because you are less worried about the consequences of missing your plane. Second, even when you don't actually miss your plane you may sometimes have to endure lesser unpleasantnesses like having to run to avoid missing it.)

What about "power actions" in board games? Here I mostly agree with Daniel, but with a proviso: If there is uncertainty about when the game is going to end, then on any given occasion you may find that it ends before you use a "power action" but that you were still right (in the sense of "executing a good strategy" rather than "doing things that turn out in hindsight to be optimal") not to use it earlier. Because maybe there was an 80% chance that the game would go on longer and you'd have a more effective time to use it later, and only a 20% chance that it would end this soon.

On the real-life application, I think Daniel is probably right that many people are too conservative about spending social capital.

She responded that, of course it was, and proved it thus: She is against it. She is against him. Therefore he is for it.

That sounds so extremely stupid that I have to ask: Is that literally, in so many words, what she said, or is it possible that she said something (still presumably stupid but) a bit less stupid, and there's a slight element of caricature in your presentation of what she said?

New Less Wrong -- now twice as welcoming as the old one!

:D

I labelled them A and B for clarity and included links to the other one in each.