Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info — LessWrong

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One of the classic demonstrations of the Fundamental Attribution Error is the 'quiz study' of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977). In the study, subjects were randomly assigned to either ask or answer questions in quiz show style, and were observed by other subjects who were asked to rate them for competence/knowledge. Even knowing that the assignments were random did not prevent the raters from rating the questioners higher than the answerers. Of course, when we rate individuals highly the affect heuristic comes into play, and if we're not careful that can lead to a super-happy death spiral of reverence. Students can revere teachers or science popularizers (even devotion to Richard Dawkins can get a bit extreme at his busy web forum) simply because the former only interact with the latter in domains where the students know less. This is certainly a problem with blogging, where the blogger chooses to post in domains of expertise. Specifically, Eliezer's writing at Overcoming Bias has p

x Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info — LessWrong Affective Death Spiral Principles Community Frontpage 129 Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info by CarlShulman 21st Mar 2009 3 min read 72 129 Follow-up to : Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult , Cultish Countercultishness One of the classic demonstrations of the Fundamental Attribution Error is the 'quiz study' of Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977). In the study, subjects were randomly assigned to either ask or answer questions in quiz show style, and were observed by other subjects who were asked to rate them for competence/knowledge. Even knowin

Don't Revere The Bearer Of Good Info — LessWrong

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