Story so far

In the 2nd post on the purpose of life, we discussed how our feelings could not be trusted and that the clue we have been left with seems like biases. Maybe by understanding biases, and why they actually exist, maybe we can go closer towards our true value system. With that pretext, today we start our chapter with Heuristic and biases. We first want to get a basic idea and then start up with hypothesis. Next stop Wikipedia.

Availability Heuristic

Events seem more probable to us based on their availability. For someone who buys lotteries, his availability of jubilant winners is more than the actual statistics of the millions who have won nothing. For someone who is asked if there are more number of words starting with K or more number of words with 3rd letter as K, the answer seems to be that there are more number of words starting with K, due to the ready availability of words such as Kite, Kill and when thinking about words whose 3rd letter is K, I can almost think of nothing.

I guess this applies to people who judge that a lot of rapes are very common in India. Its the availability. Only Statistics can tell the truth. Apparently even just imagining that a football team will have a great season, significantly increased their chances of winning in your view.

Representativeness

Conjunction fallacy

A study had a statement followed by people rating some statements about Linda. “Linda is a outspoken, independent women who worked on psychology…”. The people were asked if Linda is a bank teller or if Linda is a bank teller and a feminist. So they were asked which one is likely. Majority of the people revealed that they thought the later to be true. Given the options that event X happened or both X and Y happened, it can never happen that the probability of both X&Y happening be greater than X.

Ignorance of sample size

It is observed that subjects assign same likelihood of obtaining the the same mean height over a sample set of 10, 100, 1000

Misperception of Randomness

The probability of an event doesn’t change as a result of the event being performed several times in the past. The gambling fallacy, is a prime example of this. Gamblers tend to think that the outcome of a roulette will be black as the several previous ones were red. In reality, the event of gambling on a roulette has a said probability and it doesn’t change. In other words the probability of getting heads while tossing a coin(event), is the same irrespective of the number of heads you got earlier.

Anchoring

Subjects tend to choose a number closer to the anchor. Say when you ask someone, how many months before or after 1992 was Einstein born, they use the anchor that you provide, i.e., 1992 and say a number around it. This is called anchoring. Despite the fact that the anchor can be ridiculous numbers, the output was heavily manipulated by the anchor.

Evaluation

I spent time from 22 to 23 reading about biases, in an attempt to hopefully have content to write. It was a painful moment when I decided that I am not going to write today. Somehow, when I saw opportunity to not solve problems today but to start writing, namely put pullayar suli, it was ok, I found the motivation to do so. Yes I started by 22 hrs only. Was procrastinating until then. Finished by 12:30. A very bad attempt. Although I learnt something about biases, I didn’t give myself time to come up with own examples from life or even connect it to the questions I have been facing or trying to answer. I fully wrote this essay based on the wikipedia article.