The idea of deferring to common wisdom while continuing to formulate your own model reminds me EY’s post on Lawful Uncertainty. The focus was an experiment from the 60s where subjects guessed card colors from a deck of 70% blue cards. People keep on trying to guess red based on their own predictions even though the optimal strategy was to always pick blue. EY’s insight which this reminded me of was:
Even if subjects think they’ve come up with a hypothesis, they don’t have to actually bet on that prediction in order to test their hypothesis. They can say, “Now if this hypothesis is correct, the next card will be red”—and then just bet on blue. They can pick blue each time, accumulating as many nickels as they can, while mentally noting their private guesses for any patterns they thought they spotted. If their predictions come out right, then they can switch to the newly discovered sequence.
The idea of deferring to common wisdom while continuing to formulate your own model reminds me EY’s post on Lawful Uncertainty. The focus was an experiment from the 60s where subjects guessed card colors from a deck of 70% blue cards. People keep on trying to guess red based on their own predictions even though the optimal strategy was to always pick blue. EY’s insight which this reminded me of was: