Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Great minds might not think alike, published by UnexpectedValues on LessWrong. Write a Review This is a linkpost for/ [Previously known as "Alike minds think great"] I. It is famously the case that almost everyone thinks they’re above average. Derek Sivers writes: Ninety-four percent of professors say they are better-than-average teachers. Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student. Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers. Interesting. Intuitively this seems to suggest that people are prone to vastly overestimate their competence. But is that true? As Bill Kuszmaul points out, these people aren’t necessarily wrong! There’s no fundamental reason why you can’t have 90% of people be better than average. For example, more than 99.9% of people have an above-average number of legs. And more than 90% of people commit fewer felonies than average. These examples are obvious, but they’re not so different than some of the examples [in Sivers’ post]. This has something to it! On the other hand, I don’t think this explains everything. Is the quality of a professor’s teaching really so skewed that 94% are above average? But more importantly, do you really think that way fewer people would answer “yes” if you just replaced the word “average” with “median” when asking the question? That said, I don’t think these numbers necessarily point to a bias! That’s because the interpretation of “above average” is left entirely up to the person being asked. Maybe you think a good driver is one who drives safely (and so you drive safely and slowly) whereas I think a good driver is one who gets from point A to point B efficiently (and so I drive quickly but not safely). We are both, from our own perspectives, above average drivers! Put otherwise, for any skill where “goodness at that skill” doesn’t have an objective, agreed-upon measure, we should expect more than 50% of people to think they’re better than the median, because people optimize for things they care about. To give a personal example, I suppose I would call myself an above average blogger. This isn’t true in some objective sense; it’s just that I judge bloggers by how interesting their thoughts are to me, and obviously I write about things that are interesting to me! There’s no bias I’m falling for here; it’s just that “Are you an above average blogger?” leaves “above average” open to my interpretation. II. There is, however, a closely related bias that I and lots of other people have. This bias occurs when we take a situation like those above, but now create a more objective test of that skill. To illustrate with an example, suppose you asked all the students at a university whether they have an above-median GPA. If 90% of students said yes, that would demonstrate a widespread bias — because unlike “Are you a better than the median student”, here there’s no room for interpretation. The way this bias manifests in me (and many others I imagine) is: I tend to underestimate the competence of people who think very differently from me. I started thinking about this the other day when I listened to Julia Galef’s podcast episode with David Shor (which I highly recommend1). Shor is a young Democratic political strategist, originally hired by Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign to run their data operation and figure out how the campaign should spend its money. Shor says: When I first started in 2012, I was 20 and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to do all of this math and we’re going to win elections.” And I was with all these other nerds, we were in this cave. We really hated these old school consultants who had been in politics for like 20 years. [.] We had all these disagreements because the old school consultants were like, “You need to go up on TV, you need to focus o...