
Partisan Bias Diminishes When Partisans Pay - ColinWright
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/55494.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2FhCQh+%28Marginal+Revolution%29
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ajuc
Imagine you honestly believe in intelligent design. You probably know most
people believe the opposite, so when you encounter poll designed by people you
don't know you assume they believe evolution theory is true, so if you want to
win money you say whatever it takes, no matter what you believe.

So IMHO this experiment measured how well people predict what experimenter
thinks is correct, and not how people beliefs change when incentivized.

To control for this divide the group that gets money into 2, and say to one
subgroup you're republican think-tank, and to the other you're democrat think-
tank, and compare the results :)

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btilly
_Imagine you honestly believe in intelligent design. You probably know most
people believe the opposite, so when you encounter poll designed by people you
don't know you assume they believe evolution theory is true..._

That's a poor example that demonstrates your own ignorance about the USA as a
whole.

In the USA more people believe in creationism (God created everything 6000
years ago) than intelligent design. And far more people believe in intelligent
design than evolution.

See [http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-
huma...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-
origins.aspx) for the numbers. It is worth noting that belief in evolution is
within a factor of two of belief that Obama is a Muslim (about 20%) and belief
that Elvis is still alive (around 7%).

~~~
mmanfrin
You are missing the forest for his tree example.

He was using creationism as a means to illustrate a point: that the responders
probably tilted their responses towards _what they thought the researchers
believed_ instead of what they themselves believed.

~~~
btilly
Obviously I understood his point.

My point remains that the USA is much less accepting of science than most
educated people in a bubble of similarly educated people will realize.

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twoodfin
But is there any way to exploit this effect? I am a big believer in federalism
and even further devolution of power to smaller polities. It's a good tradeoff
of liberty vs. society: If you don't like the way your city is run, it's a lot
easier to move to the next town over than it is to leave the country. As a
result, despite being a pretty _laissez faire_ guy, I'm much more tolerant of,
say, San Francisco banning plastic shopping bags than if the EPA were to do
so.

It also has the pleasant result of giving voters much more direct control over
the way the government that affects them most is run. Their vote really does
matter; it is, in many ways, a "bet" on which policies will provide the best
outcomes for them.

~~~
rayiner
The problem of federalism is that a lot of polities will be shitty and the
rest of the country won't stand for it. Segregation would still probably be
legal in many parts of the country if the federal government hadn't put the
states in their place in the 1960's and 1970's.

Also, how do you reconcile glorification of federalism with the fact that the
level of corruption and general terribleness in the big state governments is
far worse than that of the federal government, despite the federal government
being much larger and more extensive? Would you really rather devolve power
from the federal government to California, Illinois, New York, Texas, or
Florida? Ohio, Georgia, Massachusetts? Sure, as you say you can move, and
that's a fair point, but the only states that are arguably well-run are the
ones that are also insignificant in terms of population and GDP (or have
economies based on unsustainable things like federal spending (Virginia), oil
resources (the Dakotas), etc).

~~~
crusso
_Segregation would still probably be legal in many parts of the country if the
federal government hadn't put the states in their place_

Segregation would still probably exist without the feds stepping in therefore
let's spend trillions of dollars a year driving our economy into the dirt.

Then on the other side, you have the Dred Scott Decision, the Fugitive Slave
Act and many other Federal moves that prolonged slavery in this country. Would
it not have been for the northern states and churches, the Federal Government
would have been able to keep slavery itself in place.

Bottom line is that we want to maximize freedom for individuals and small
group decision making wherever possible. Larger entities should only step in
when individuals or small groups can't work it out for themselves.

~~~
tptacek
The federal government decisions that prolonged slavery were animated by the
interests of states that would without a strong central government still have
slavery, and impacted mostly those states, so I'm not sure that helps your
argument much.

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pfedor
You actually think that these states would still have slavery? To this day,
thirty years after the last country in the world (Mauritania) abolished it?

~~~
tptacek
Segregation would still be de-jure lawful in Alabama, in the same way that
sodomy laws were still technically enforceable in Texas until struck down by
SCOTUS.

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JoshTriplett
Getting people to make decisions that directly impact them is a good way of
figuring out which beliefs they actually use to predict the behavior of the
world and which beliefs they only profess but in some way know are false.

Consider someone who claims "I have a dragon in my garage.". When someone asks
to test that claim by looking, you say it's an invisible dragon. When they
then say they'll listen to the dragon breathing, you say the dragon doesn't
need to breathe. If they offer to throw a bag of flour over it and see the
shape of the flour-covered dragon, you say the dragon is permeable to flour.
Despite saying you have a dragon in your garage, all your predictions are
based on not having a dragon in your garage. If you _actually_ thought you had
a dragon in your garage, you'd say "sure, let's see"; you should be perfectly
willing to test that claim and accept the result. (Credit to
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/> for the dragon example.)

The same lines of experimental questioning can generally distinguish between
"I truly believe this and use it as a model to predict how the world works"
and "I profess this but when it comes time to predict how the world works I do
so using a model that actually _works_.".

On the other hand, if you build a system that rewards people for how strongly
they profess their beliefs, and how much confirmation and support they get
from others professing the same beliefs, you can give strong positive
reinforcement to beliefs that do not model the world.

~~~
msg
There is a problem with the invisible dragon.

If your believer is aware that the strongest alternative to their belief that
there is a dragon in the garage is that there is no dragon, they will tailor
their explanations to your perspective. That doesn't prove they share your
perspective deep down if they could just admit it to themselves, it just means
they understand you.

~~~
JoshTriplett
It doesn't matter whether they understand the other person's beliefs or not;
the question is, what do they actually believe experiments will show about the
world, before performing the experiments? If they truly _expect_ that there's
a dragon in their garage, they'll expect results consistent with having a
dragon in their garage; if they don't actually believe that, they'll make
predictions consistent with not having a dragon in their garage.

~~~
msg
They believe that you will see X because you believe Y, while they will see P
because they believe Q. They believe that Y-ers' worldviews cause them to
interpret P as X, and blind them to seeing X as P. They don't believe that
there is a neutral substrate of observation that everyone can agree on
beforehand.

I don't completely disagree with what you're saying, I am just trying to point
out that the game goes many levels deep. A strategy that leads to victory on
level 1, "tell me more about this dragon", is not going to work on level 2.

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sesqu
A major problem with this experimental setting, and the proposal that bets
signal belief, is that they ignore the system the bets are placed in.

As students observe, "the right answer" depends on who's doing the judging.
Most students have learned to answer not what they believe, but what they
believe the examiner wants to hear. This is a fairly important skill, as many
examiners are incapable of asking even unambiguous questions.

On the other side of the equation, information signalled in a bet is tainted
by the signaller. The answer they give is not necessarily their "honest
belief", but rather what they wish to signal as such. Much of high-stakes
information, such as in politics, commerce, and warfare, is valued opaquely,
for the purpose of enticing onlookers to act on the bets that they do see,
which can be counter to the interests of the bettor.

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Sambdala
This effect doesn't go away entirely though (as was admittedly stated in the
article).

In political betting markets, you can almost always find a +EV bet by betting
on the most likely candidate to win because those who are on the side of the
underdog always overprice their candidate's chances, some of this can be
attributed to buying into the neck-and-neck rhetoric.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favourite-longshot_bias>

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DanielBMarkham
Another commmenter hit this, but it deserves underlining.

You can't ask the question of whether certain statements, to the people giving
them, are matters of fact or political opinion, and then have "correct"
answers which are provided by others. If you have correct answers, you already
know that certain opinions are based on error. The only thing you can do with
such an experiment is measure how well people can guess what the judges think
to be true. As it turns out, they did fairly well.

I could care less about this example, but let's take the WMD question. Old WMD
was found in Iraq.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destru...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Chemical_Weapons_Recovered)

A partisan wouldn't argue the facts. He'd simply point out that, depending on
how you phrase the question, the answer could be interpreted either way. The
questioner has to rephrase "After the second Gulf War, were WMD found that
were created in between the two wars?"

This easily goes to extremes, and questions end up being extremely detailed in
order to resolve matters of "fact" This is why the role of fact-checker is a
waste of time. Most all of the time, politicians aren't lying, they're simply
phrasing things in enough ambiguity to create the desired impression. (This
actually works for me as "bullshit", but it's not lying, and it's not giving
out factual errors)

~~~
jessriedel
I find this line of argument very unconvincing. Would you apply it to the
question of whether inflation and/or unemployment went down during Regan's
term? Do you really think this has anything to do with the precise definition
of those quantities?

~~~
jeffdavis
I think you picked a poor example, because inflation is hard to measure and
hard to define.

I know lots of people who argue with our current definition of inflation using
reasonable-sounding arguments.

~~~
dyno12345
Inflation is only hard to define for those who want there to be something
called "inflation" that predicts recessions and is caused by the government.
Naturally it's hard to find anything to nail down within those parameters.

In the rest of the world inflation equals price increases and there are
standard metrics that have been used for decades. Most economists would
probably agree that those metrics have several well-known flaws. But we can
agree that inflation according to the definitions and metrics that 99% of the
world uses did or did not change by X or Y in a given time period.

~~~
jeffdavis
The fact that the existing metrics are flawed mean that it's perfectly
reasonable for a person to both:

(a) Believe one thing (b) Understand that the "accepted fact" contradicts
their belief

If no money is on the line, this reasonable person will state their belief. If
money is on the line, they are more likely to state whatever they think the
"accepted fact" is, regardless of their true belief.

In politics, there are many things for which minor differences in
interpretation can cause a "fact" to change between true, false, and unknown.
Inflation is certainly one of those things.

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joelthelion
Too bad there isn't anymore a great prediction market. This could be a nice
opportunity for bitcoin.

