[ExI] Saliency Bias?

[BillK]

Todays Dilbert cartoon refers to 'saliency bias'.

This struck me as an unusual term. So I googled, as you do......

It isn't listed in the vast Wikipedia list of cognitive biases.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>

So.... that probably means that it could be a different name for another bias.

After a bit more reading, it seems to be similar to Attentional bias.

"Salience biases refer to the fact that colorful, dynamic or other
distictive stimuli disproportionately engage attention, and
accordingly disproportionately affect judgements".

"salience bias", the fascinating tendency humans have to worry about
dramatic things (explosions, disasters, big fierce animals, etc.),
rather than to objectively evaluate the odds.
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OK. That agrees with the idea that the world will end not with a bang,
but with a whimper.


As Scott Aaronson comments:
    I think it's easy to fall victim to "premature Bayesianism": that
is, trying to be rigorous by demanding probabilities for specific
astronomically unlikely events, while implicitly assigning many other
related events a probability of 0 because you haven't even considered
them. Economists might consider this an instance of salience bias.
>From my perspective, though, something like it is probably inevitable
when computationally-bounded agents like ourselves try to simulate
Bayesian rationality. We're never going to succeed, since the space of
potentially-relevant events is exponentially large, and summing over
them would be #P-complete even if we knew the right prior.

    As a side note, it's always struck me how people get more worked
up about civilization being destroyed by grey goo or malevolent
AI-bots or particle physics disasters, than they do about its
destruction by completely non-hypothetical methods: say chopping down
all the forests, filling the oceans with garbage and the atmosphere
with billions of years' worth of accumulated carbon. Maybe the fact
that the real dangers are (relatively) slow creates a false sense of
security, or maybe the fact that they're real makes them less fun to
worry about.
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Now that makes saliency bias really important.


BillK