User:IssaRice/Belief propagation and cognitive biases
- "Several cognitive biases can be seen as confusion between probabilities and likelihoods, most centrally base-rate neglect." [1]
- confusing p-values with Pr(null hypothesis | data) seems like another instance of this.
- confidence interval vs credible interval also does this flipping about the conditional bar.
- I think a polytree graph like can illuminate the halo effect/horn effect
- Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox The page even says "The effect is related to the explaining away phenomenon in Bayesian networks."
- Fundamental attribution error? The simplified DAG would look like: situational influence → observed action ← personality. And the evidence feeds into the "observed action" node, which propagates upwards to the "situational influence" and "personality" nodes. I think the bias is that the "personality" node gets updated too much. Can belief propagation give insight into this?
- This one might be too simple, but the idea of screening off I think can be visualized in a Bayesian network. Not sure where the belief propagation would come in though... Related here are [2]/stereotyping.
- Hindsight bias seems like an evidence node misfiring and causing updates in the graph? See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TiDGXt3WrQwtCdDj3/do-we-believe-everything-we-re-told
- Buckets error and flinching away from truth: I think you can formulate a probabilistic version of my comment using bayes nets and belief prop. (in that case, there still may or may not be causality involved; i think all you need are the independence relationships.)
- [3] the sour grapes/tolerification seems pretty similar, but the steps go like this: (1) initially, one has stored. (2) the world shows you in a way that's undeniable (this is contrasted with the buckets error situation, where someone merely asserts/brings to attention ). (3) one does the modus ponens, obtaining . Here, is undesirable, but even more undesirable is , and by (2), we cannot deny . So we pick the best of the bads and stick with .