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Comment by nealeratzlaff on Collider bias as a cognitive blindspot? · 2020-12-30T08:20:44.153Z · LW · GW

The difficulty of correctly reasoning with probabilities reminds of something Geoff Hinton said about working in high dimensional space (paraphrasing): "when we try to imagine high dimensions, we all just imagine a 3D surface and say 'N dimensions' really loud in our heads". I have a habit of trying to use probabilities whenever I'm trying to reason about something, but I'm becoming increasingly sure that my Bayes net (or causal graph) is badly wired with wrong probabilities everywhere. 

I see quite a few papers on PubMed discussing collider bias with regard to obesity-associated health risks. The effect is probably in full swing with covid research, unfortunately.