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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I don't want to take the comments into a tangential dialog. And, I apologize to anyone who thought my original comment was inappropriate or offensive.

I thought it was appropriate to point out that, while the bias described in the post is real and common, we also see examples of the reverse of the problem (denying responsiblity for successes rather than failure). My point was to caution against overcompensating for the original bias as a strategy, rather than to merely be aware of the phenomenon and look for the best explanations for all outcomes.

And, it seems to me that taking a single example as in indication that I'm the sort of person who takes every opportunity to bash religion, says much more about the reader's biases than mine.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

1) I wonder if hindsight bias plays a role in the asymetric explanations. Ex post, events tend to be more obvious than they were ex ante. If I assume that I am smart, then if I get something right, it is probably because I saw or intuited the obvious outcome. If I got something wrong when it seems to have been obvious, it must have been because I was unlucky.

2) On your gambling optimists and pessimists point, if you are correct, that would suggest that gambling pessimists should have greater skewness preference than gambling optimists. Otherwise, why would a pessimist ever gamble?

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