Blog cafe : Correcting bias

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Most of the discussion on this blog seems to focus on figuring out how to identify biases. We implicitly assume that this is the hard part; that biases can be really sneaky and hard to ferret out, but that once you’ve identified a bias, correcting it is pretty straightforward and mechanical. If you’ve figured out that you have a bias that causes you to systematically overestimate the probability of a particular kind of event happening by .2, you simply subtract .2 from future estimates (or whatever). But it seems to me that actually correcting a bias can be pretty hard even once it’s been identified. For example, I have a tendency to swing a bit too late at a (slow-pitch) softball. I’m sure this bias could be at least partially corrected with effort, but it is definitely not simply a matter of saying to myself: “swing .5 seconds sooner than you feel like you should swing.” That just can’t be done in real time without screwing up the other mechanics of the swing.

I think this is also a problem for more consequential matters In real decision-making situations, where there are elements of the problem that need attention besides the (already identified) bias, it is not going to be a trivial matter to fix the bias without screwing up some other part of the problem even worse.