We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think — LessWrong

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Over the past few years, we have discreetly approached colleagues faced with a choice between job offers, and asked them to estimate the probability that they will choose one job over another. The average confidence in the predicted choice was a modest 66%, but only 1 of the 24 respondents chose the option to which he or she initially assigned a lower probability, yielding an overall accuracy rate of 96%. —Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky1 When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question. How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; the t

x We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think — LessWrong Seeing with Fresh Eyes Calibration Heuristics & Biases Frontpage 127 We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think by Eliezer Yudkowsky 3rd Oct 2007 2 min read 120 127 Over the past few years, we have discreetly approached colleagues faced with a choice between job offers, and asked them to estimate the probability that they will choose one job over another. The average confidence in the predicted choice was a modest 66%, but only 1 of the 24 respondents chose the option to which he or she initially assigned a lower probability, yieldin

We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think — LessWrong

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