Tag Archives: Robin Hanson

Overcoming Bias dot com = Robin Hanson’s group blog on truth discovery and decision rationality

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A Web-based “forum”, rather, he says:

To me “forum” connotes that we [CFM: the blogging scholars] are primarily talking to each other, though we don’t mind if others join in to comment or listen.

“Blog” to me connotes that we are primarily writing for other people, and we are just sharing the load of putting together something for those readers.

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URL: Overcoming Bias dot com

Overcoming Bias

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Addendum: Robin Hanson has just posted a comment…

Chris, the picture is a famous painting of Ulysses bound to the mast listening to the Sirens; the rest of the crew has their ears plugged to avoid the severely biased Siren Song. 

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What Is The Meaning Of His Blog Header? No idea. I wonder whether his 2005 Marginal Revolution post (”Hanged For Accuracy”) gives us a clue:

I came across an even more dramatic example of such thinking in Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1995:11-12):

Returning home victorious from Gibraltar after skirmishes with the French … the English fleet … discovered to their horror that they had misgauged their longitude … the Scillies became the unmarked tombstones for two thousand of Sir Clowdisley’s troops. [Admiral Sir Clowdisley] had been approached by a sailor, … who claimed to have kept his own reckoning of the fleet’s location during the whole cloudy passage. Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy, as the unnamed seaman well knew. However, the danger appeared so enormous, by his calculations, that he risked his neck to make his concerns known to the officers. Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot. … In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction.

Even though shipmates had a strong common interest in knowing their longitude, other social incentives apparently prevented them from sharing their information. As a consultant on the use of prediction markets within organizations, I’ve also noticed that managers are often surprisingly uninterested in the prospect of more accurate forecasts and more informed decisions. Could these phenomena have similar explanations?

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About Overcoming Bias:

How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us we that are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.

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Overcoming Bias dot com will be authored by 14 (academic or not) scholars. Among them, 5 usual suspects from the field of prediction markets, including the owner of this microscopic little blog (who would do just anything to get linked to by Midas Oracle).

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Speaking of bias, is our good doctor Robin Hanson as innocent as Snow White? Let’s take a look at “The Wisdom Of His Crowd“. Here’s an excerpt of the 2005 poll he asked his acquaintances (the author of these lines being one among many) to fill in, so as to discover what could be his next academic project.

Here are the ten main choices as I see them now:

1. Disagreement Book – Expand “Are Disagreements Honest” and related papers into a book, adding new material on data about who is right in real disagreements. I’ve been telling people this is my plan. This could establish my reputation as a deep thinker on a big issue. Fun, as there are still things for me to learn on this topic. No real competition on this topic (as least re the more technical angle), and it is nicely not aligned with an ideology. But not clear this will really change much in the world.

See the key sentence??? “I’VE BEEN TELLING PEOPLE THIS IS MY PLAN.” Ha. ha. ha. Totally biased poll. And, SURPRISE, SURPRISE, of course, that poll gave the option #1 (”the disagreement book”) as the most popular answer. NO WONDER. And so we are here, today, with our Robin Hanson opening a group blog on “overcoming bias”. (The “idea futures book” came as a close #2. Had he suppressed the bias in his poll, we would have had Robin Hanson opening a group blog on prediction markets, today, instead.)

Maybe the first topic of discussion among these 14 luminaries (or so they think they are) should be: How to overcome Robin Hanson’s biased polls?

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How To Subscribe To Robin Hanson’s Group Blog:

His Royal Highness publicizes the “RSS 1.0″ site feed, on his right sidebar. It’s an old format; complete crap.

Ouch! – Finding from a Web usability expert (Jakob Nielsen): 50% of Web readers dont scroll down the webpage.

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From today&#8217-s New York Times:

Studies by Mr. Nielsen’s company, the Nielsen Norman Group, an Internet design firm in Fremont, Calif., show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor. “Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page,” Mr. Nielsen said. “A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.”

Web Usability Links:

– Jakob Nielsen: UseIt.com – AlertBox –

– David Pennock and Robin Hanson, the wannabe bloggers, would probably pass the following Jakob Nielsen test: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes – by Jakob Nielsen – 2005-10-17

– Alex Kirtland – Blog: Usable Markets – E-mail interview with Alex Kirtland.

Speculating (and hedging?) on US presidential prediction markets would have social utility. Dixit Robin Hanson.

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If Deep Throat is right and the CFTC has indeed already given its stamp of approval to presidential prediction markets, then HedgeStreet and USFE would be well advised to listen to professor Robin Hanson&#8217-s idea with great attention:

Using data from a site like Tradesports.com to forecast who will win an election is just scratching the surface, said Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, and one of the founders of the field of prediction markets. Although the economic incentive is high for picking a winner, Hanson would like to see prediction markets forecast the consequences of a candidate getting into office. Will unemployment go up or down? Will we have more or less trouble in Iraq? Will we decrease or increase the deficit? &#8220-The social value of telling people who&#8217-s likely to win is questionable. The social value of telling people the consequences is arguably far higher,&#8221- said Hanson.

My Question To Professor Robin Hanson: The prediction market that would be interesting would be the one featuring the elected candidate (the so-called &#8220-President-Elect&#8221-). But the expiry of the other prediction markets, featuring the defeated presidential candidates, would be impossible to judge, since these presidential candidates by definition won&#8217-t take office and have any power on the US government. And if the game is murky, you won&#8217-t find any traders willing to risk his/her shirt on those kinds of US presidential prediction markets.

Addendum: Robin Hanson has posted a comment, and I republish it here for everyone to see&#8230-

Let U = the unemployment rate, D = Democrats win, and R = Republicans win. An exchange rate between “Pays $U if D” and “Pays $1 if D” gives an estimate of E[U|D]. Similarly, an exchange rate between “Pays $U if R” and “Pays $1 if R” gives an estimate of E[U|R]. We can compare E[U|D] and E[U|R] to see which candidate is expected to have a lower unemployment rate. And we know how to pay off all of these assets, no matter what happens.

Robin Hanson would like to see prediction markets forecast the consequences of a candidate getting into office. – REDUX