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Gambler’s and hot-hand fallacies

Both are misinterpretations of statistical independence. They both deal with erroneous beliefs about sequences of independent or nearly independent events. The belief that independent, random events are influenced by past outcomes.

Gambler's Fallacy is about expecting a reversal in a pattern, while the hot-hand fallacy involves expecting a continuation of a pattern.

They're related in that they both deal with erroneous beliefs about sequences of independent or nearly independent events. For example, thinking a flipped coin is "due" for heads after several tails. This is a cognitive error; each coin flip is independent with a 50/50 chance. The fallacy is a misunderstanding of statistical independence and the law of large numbers.

The hot-hand fallacy is the opposite belief to Gambler's Fallacy: the conviction that a streak of successful outcomes increases the probability of future success. For example, basketball betters see certain players get the “hot-hand,” believing a basketball player who has made several shots will continue to do so, even when they are actually seeing lucky streaks that are consistent with the player’s typical scoring percentage.

@October 27, 2023

Neglect of tasks with vague results

Difficulty in prioritizing actions when there's no feedback loops, immediate results or tangible results, often leading to a neglect of them.

• It's tough to stick to exercise when there's no immediate sign it's helping you avoid a heart attack.
• Overeating doesn't seem to have instant drawbacks, so it's hard to stick to a healthy diet.

@October 17, 2023

Small things don’t seem to add up to large things

Many small actions that over time add up to something large may be hard to prioritize and see it real value. It’s difficult to tangibly connect each small sub-action to the bigger one.

Examples:

• Procrastination: A few moments of delay might not seem like a big deal, but they add up. After wasting hours, you end up feeling unproductive and bad about yourself.
• Health: Skipping a healthy choice one day seems harmless, but these choices add up and affect your overall health.

@October 16, 2023

Planning fallacy

A tendency to underestimate the time, resources, or effort required to complete a task, despite having knowledge of past experiences where similar tasks took longer than anticipated

Examples:

“Would you care to guess how many students finished on or before their estimated 50%, 75%, and 99% probability levels? 13% of subjects finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability level; 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability level; and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability level. … The Denver International Airport opened 16 months late, at a cost overrun of $2 billion.1 The Eurofighter Typhoon, a joint defense project of several European countries, was delivered 54 months late at a cost of $19 billion instead of $7 billion. The Sydney Opera House may be the most legendary construction overrun of all time, originally estimated to be completed in 1963 for $7 million, and finally completed in 1973 for $102 million. “ – Planning Fallacy Sequences

@October 6, 2024

Disagreement curse 🎨

Disagreement is the default course of communication.

Contrary to Aumann's Agreement Theorem on any given topic seemingly honest, seemingly truth-seeking agents with seemingly common priors almost always disagree.

Examples: even in Adversarial collaboration, when collaborators set out to unify their competing theories, to find cruxes of disagreement, agreement almost never happens.

@September 26, 2023

Conjunction fallacy

Conjunction fallacy occurs when people believe that the co-occurrence of two events is more likely than the occurrence of one of the events alone, despite the fact that the probability of two events occurring together is always lower than the probability of either event occurring alone.

For example there is a question and two options: something that happens rarely, 12% of the time, and something that happens often, 80% of the time. However, when the more likely option is presented, our minds become fixated on it, much like a child fixated by a glowing lollipop. We lose sight of the fact that when the less likely option is presented alongside the more likely one, it has a lower chance of occurring, at only 9.6% (12% * 80%), compared to when it is presented alone at 12%.

The conjunction fallacy also occurs when the second option associates us with the profile of what we are trying to find. For example Katy was a student, who was deeply concerned with issues of social justice, and also participated in anti-discrimination demonstrations. Which is more probable? Katy is a bank teller or Katy is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

This may be related to Binary trap 🎨. Our minds may have a preference to pick simpler answers, one that are easier to understand and process, even if a more complex answer is more accurate.

@August 6, 2023

New notes

Liv Boerree on game theory of old-school, hustler-type poker players

Back then, no one understood game theory, no one understood the mechanics of how the game worked. And the best players in the world were typically older, kind of hustler types who would spend decades in casinos seeing a gamut of human behavior and developing really strong intuitions. Often they would make this really strange plays that would turn out to be correct and they would not even able to explain to you why they did it. It was purely  an automatic, unconscious, intuitive process going on. But then online poker and data analytics software appeared. Now all of a sudden we had data that poker pros could look at and use to analyze where they were going wrong, where there were leaks in their game. The game basically went through a scientific revolution away from this pure of just feeling, having a vibe of someone. In reality you cannot be a top professional these days without having that mathematical foundation. If you are someone who are playing game theory optimal style, even though is nome ways is it’s kind of robotic, you just can’t beat it by pure intuition alone. – Liv Boeree link

@November 8, 2023

Excerpt from reading: Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours`

* The Gypsies and Amish will ostracize members who defy the court – but since everyone lives in fear of ostracization, in real life they’ll just pay the fine or make their public confession or whatever. * The English will hang criminals at the drop of a hat – but since the threat of hanging incentivizes them to bribe prosecutors, in reality few people will need to be hanged. The * Icelandic courts could declare offenders outlaws who can be killed without repercussion – but the threat encourages Icelanders to pay the wergeld, and nobody has to get outlawed. * The Somalis are ready to have murderous family feuds – but the possibility of such a feud keeps people willing to go to arbitration. * Even our own legal system works like this. The police can physically drag you to jail, kicking and screaming. But more likely you’re going to plea bargain, or agree to community service, or at least be cooperative and polite while the police take you away. Plea bargains – which are easier for prosecutors, easier for defendants, and easier for taxpayers – seem like a good example of cultural evolution in action; once someone thought them up, there was no way they weren’t going to take over everything despite their very serious costs.

@November 6, 2023

Notes on reading: Decision making and decentralisation in EA by William MacAskill

I liked the following

This quote on how conformity can arise in a culture that is too scrupulous:

It’s centralised insofar as people are often highly scrupulous, and can feel like they’re being a “bad EA” in some way if they aren’t acting in line with the wider group, and will be negatively judged. I think the highly critical culture, especially online, contributes to pressures towards conformity as a side-effect; people worry that if they say or do something different, they’ll get attacked. Personally, at least, I think that this latter aspect is one of the threads within EA culture I’d most like to see change.

Related: Coordination

@October 11, 2023

In a magic laptop I would write

What is it? If you write a press release on the “Magic Laptop,” it becomes real. You just specify who agrees to do what (org A agrees to take action B). via Spencer Greenberg more here

My answer? Vitalik Buterin, Holden Karnofsky, Nick Bostrom, Paul Graham, Philip Tetlock, Scott Alexander, and Julia Galef have launched an accelerator to reshape and pioneer innovative societal coordination mechanisms for a resilient, interconnected, and thriving future.

@October 10, 2023

Local differences are exaggerated and take-off speeds

Listening to Paul Christiano and putting more weights on take-off speeds may be quicker than they seem to him (even though he beliefs on quick take-off speeds, but not as quick as Eliezer Yudkowsky) as we may be distorted around assessing human-level cognitive abilities – differences are exaggerated and the real distance is smaller in the same way they as it works in this Local differences are exaggerated

@October 5, 2023

Self-wiki is the best spaced repetition software

Finding a more effective way to memorize information can be challenging, and while tools like ANKi cards have their merits, they might not be the optimal solution for everyone. I believe there's a method that's not only more efficient but also more enjoyable and less draining on one's willpower.

What I advocate for, and personally use, is creating a self-wiki. Essentially, it's a public knowledge base of information you think is worthwhile and worth remembering.

The approach is simple: Write it down in your own words. Don't just copy and paste; you need to be the author of the content.

So, why does this method work? The social aspect of our brain gets activated when we know others can see and potentially benefit from our notes. This encourages us to regularly revisit and refine our definitions.

Why might this be superior? Spaced repetition, at its core, requires us to review and repeat information regularly. But in trying to nail the "perfect" review intervals, you might be missing the point. The biggest drawback of tools like ANKi is that they can make learning feel like a chore. It's probably not a good idea to reduce something as rewarding as learning to a tedious task. Pushing oneself continuously can be counterproductive. See more on this perspective here: Bad habits: observe not restrict

Another downside? The card decks you curate in typical spaced repetition software might not stand the test of time. In contrast, a self-wiki, being a dynamic platform, can continually evolve and be built upon.

See my wiki and make me horrified something is off.

@September 29, 2023

Why alternate explanations are so hard?

– Why is it so-hard to read and consider alternate explanations? – Why is it so-hellish-hard to read and consider alternate explanations when the source is someone I respect? – Why is it so-hellish-hellish-hard to read and consider alternate explanations when the source is someone I respect and is respected by people I respect?

@May 3, 2023

New summaries

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality

@May 25, 2023 Pav notes: This is one of the best articles I read in the last couple of years. Thumbnail looks a little technical, but it's actually not that much. I promise that some (like me) will get some big ahas! there.

Excerpt explaining main idea

“But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It's not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it. This is where we need to bring in the idea of trapped priors. …

Van der Bergh et al suggest that when experience is too intolerable, your brain will decrease bandwidth on the "raw experience" channel to protect you from the traumatic emotions. This is why some trauma victims' descriptions of their traumas are often oddly short, un-detailed, and to-the-point. This protects the victim from having to experience the scary stimuli and negative emotions in all their gory details. But it also ensures that context (and not the raw experience itself) will play the dominant role in determining their perception of an event.

I've heard some people call this "bitch eating cracker syndrome". The idea is - you're in an abusive or otherwise terrible relationship. Your partner has given you ample reason to hate them. But now you don't just hate them when they abuse you. Now even something as seemingly innocent as seeing them eating crackers makes you actively angry. In theory, an interaction with your partner where they just eat crackers and don't bother you in any way ought to produce some habituation, be a tiny piece of evidence that they're not always that bad. In reality, it will just make you hate them worse. At this point, your prior on them being bad is so high that every single interaction, regardless of how it goes, will make you hate them more. Your prior that they're bad has become trapped. And it colors every aspect of your interaction with them, so that even interactions which out-of-context are perfectly innocuous feel nightmarish from the inside.”

Excerpt on getting out of trapped priors

“If you want to get out of a trapped prior, the most promising source of hope is the psychotherapeutic tradition of treating phobias and PTSD. These people tend to recommend very gradual exposure to the phobic stimulus, sometimes with special gimmicks to prevent you from getting scared or help you "process" the information

A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail. Probably every mental health intervention (good diet, exercise, etc) does this a little. And this is super speculative, and you should feel free to make fun of me for even thinking about it, but sensory deprivation might do this too, for the same reason that your eyes become more sensitive in the dark.”

New wow ideas

Beliefs persevere even without any social pressure. … The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion … We believe what the people we love and trust believe. This is not a conscious decision to conform by hiding one's true beliefs. It's the truth, this is how we believe. – Daniel Kahneman

I want to be as publicly vulnerable as possible, because I want to broadcast acceptance towards others. – Aella As in, one of the first times I felt deep acceptance from someone else was when I watched them name an unflattering thing about themselves with openness and grace.

Flirt with abandon – via ceo

Locate an animal, mimic its expression and movement for two minutes. If there are no other lives around, observe an object and be it for two minutes. Do it regularly – Apichatpong Weerasethakul via Hans Urlich Obrist