Archives for October 2008

‘Instead, the Confirmation Bias Seeps In…’

An extremely insightful post by Jonah Lerner, on the danger of blindly trusting models:

People love models, especially when they’re big, complex and quantitative. Models make us feel safe. They take the uncertainty of the future and break it down into neat, bite-sized equations. But here’s the problem with models, which is really a problem with the human mind. We become so focused on the predictions of the model - be it the cod population, or the risk of mortgage derivatives - that we stop questioning the basic assumptions of the model. (Instead, the confirmation bias seeps in and we devote way too much mental energy to proving the model true.)

Posted by PJ on Oct 30, 2008 | Comment |

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