Can we ever escape bias?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

After a bad post with non-rigorous thinking about gender, there were some footnotes that I found interesting:

1. Eidetic imagery, vaguely related to the idea of a “photographic memory”, is the ability to visualize something and have it be exactly as clear, vivid and obvious as actually seeing it. My professor’s example (which Michael Howard somehow remembers even though I only mentioned it once a few years ago) is that although many people can imagine a picture of a tiger, only an eidetic imager would be able to count the number of stripes.

2. According to Galton, people incapable of forming images were overrepresented in math and science. I’ve since heard that this idea has been challenged, but I can’t access the study.

3. The example that really drove this home to me: what percent of high school students do you think cheat on tests? What percent have shoplifted? Someone did a survey on this recently and found that the answer was nobhg gjb guveqf unir purngrq naq nobhg bar guveq unir fubcyvsgrq (rot13ed so you have to actually take a guess first). This shocked me and everyone I knew, because we didn’t cheat or steal during high school and we didn’t know anyone who did. I spent an afternoon trying to find some proof that the study was wrong or unrepresentative and coming up with nothing.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
Source