Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you are generous here:
I perceive that many of the issues I’ve mentioned to be better explained by bias than error. In particular I just don’t think we’ll see equivalently many errors in the opposite direction. This is an empirical question however, and I’d be excited to see more careful followups to test this hypothesis.
I think you are pointing out that, when I said I think I have many biases and these are inevitable, that I am confusing bias with error.
What you are pointing out seems right to me.
Now, at the very least, this undermines my comment (and at the worst suggests I am promoting/suffering from some other form of arrogance). I’m less confident about my comment now. I think now I will reread and think about your post a lot more.
Hi. I’m glad you appear to have gained a lot from my quick reply, but for what it’s worth I did not intend my reply as an admonishment.
I think the core of what I read as your comment is probably still valid. Namely, that if I misidentified problems as biases when almost all of the failures are due to either a) noise/error or b) incompetence unrelated to decision quality (eg mental health, insufficient technical skills, we aren’t hardworking enough), then the bias identification isn’t true or useful. Likewise, debiasing is somewhere between neutral to worse than useless if the problem was never bias to begin with.
Hi,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you are generous here:
I think you are pointing out that, when I said I think I have many biases and these are inevitable, that I am confusing bias with error.
What you are pointing out seems right to me.
Now, at the very least, this undermines my comment (and at the worst suggests I am promoting/suffering from some other form of arrogance). I’m less confident about my comment now. I think now I will reread and think about your post a lot more.
Thanks again.
Hi. I’m glad you appear to have gained a lot from my quick reply, but for what it’s worth I did not intend my reply as an admonishment.
I think the core of what I read as your comment is probably still valid. Namely, that if I misidentified problems as biases when almost all of the failures are due to either a) noise/error or b) incompetence unrelated to decision quality (eg mental health, insufficient technical skills, we aren’t hardworking enough), then the bias identification isn’t true or useful. Likewise, debiasing is somewhere between neutral to worse than useless if the problem was never bias to begin with.