Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, in some cases, we know, and you can do that associatively. It really depends on the social disrupture that is imposed by a given culture. To give you a sense of the way that works, there is psychologist Paul Rozin, who has done some brilliant experiments on that. In one of the experiments, he has people, and they have a glass of orange juice, and they have a sticker. They’re asked to write on that sticker “cyanide” and to stick it on the juice and then to drink the juice. And they don’t want to. [laughter] This is something — it’s an emotion over which people have no control, and our socialization has created those emotions in us. We’re conditioned to have them under some conditions. Other cultures are disgusted by other things. Philip Tetlock has argued that, if we set up long-run tournaments with forecasting, and we measure results, and we test teams against each other, that we can, in the longer run, reduce, I think, both the noise and bias. Do you agree? And do you think there are factors he’s overlooking in how his tournaments are set up? Phil Tetlock is another friend, but he’s also a hero. I think this is beautiful research. I think it’s proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that when you have people making forecasts for the medium term — up to six months, say, in many situations — you can help people thinking carefully without any training, who do better than CIA analysts. That’s fundamentally what he has shown, and he really knows why, or he knows how they do it. And the tricks are very simple. If you made a list of intelligent ways to go at problems, that’s what people do. They view the problem as an instance of a category, and then they switch to looking at the problem from the inside. Essentially, they adopt different points of view. It’s not the same thing as what I was saying earlier about breaking up a problem into dimensions and averaging. There’s no averaging, but there is looking at a problem from multiple dimensions and collecting a lot of information. And that’s basically what creates superforecasters.…

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