Bias

2023 - 2 - 13

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Image courtesy of "VentureBeat"

Cognitive bias: The elephant in every room (VentureBeat)

Humans can't scale and narrow AI can't “think,” so neither is suitable to address cognitive bias. But scalable human-like intelligence can.

[intelligence](https://venturebeat.com/ai/deepmind-says-reinforcement-learning-is-enough-to-reach-general-ai/) can, and at humanity’s present level of scientific understanding, it is also the only thing that can. Much as innovation contest hubs discovered that experts outside of a “hard problem’s” narrow domain most frequently solved these problems, the problems that those major companies still able to transmit information today consider hard are often, and frequently already have been, solved by others. When the impending risk is at the level of cognitive death and subsequent human extinction, the selection pressure applied to the first method of overcoming the challenge becomes the maximum value possible. Information that agrees with, and is able to move across many such siloes, must thus be so agreeable as to be trivial, the very opposite of a “breakthrough.” [contributing an article](https://venturebeat.com/contribute-to-datadecisionmakers/) of your own! Should this status quo continue over the coming years, the metaphorical exit to every room will be blocked by the elephant, and the elephant’s 200-plus cognitive biases will make every decision using data of low and decreasing quality. Once this root cause is addressed, what can be done with $100 million today may only require $1 million, and with far greater odds of success and more expediently than was previously possible. This growth is the product of the trade-off between complexity and cognitive bias. Humanity is already suffering severely and comprehensively from this growing problem, in every domain and every city around the world. Frequently, they make the problem worse by shifting the damage below thresholds of perception and into “unknown unknowns.” Across government offices, tech company board rooms and the homes of every individual, there is an elephant in every room. Worse still, the elephant is growing, and sometimes that growth is exponential.

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Image courtesy of "oregonlive.com"

Readers respond: Stops show no evidence of bias (oregonlive.com)

Oregon state legislator Travis Nelson suggests that his two traffic stops in three days is evidence of overall racial bias in traffic stops, (“Watch: Police ...

What in heaven’s name was he doing conducting a Zoom call while driving, and worse, trying to reestablish the call while continuing to drive? Perhaps the state police made some improvements the following year, or perhaps it was just a regression towards their mean. The following year the state police were no longer found to be discriminating. 1 stop and speeding and not staying in his traffic lane before the Jan. Nelson concedes police had reason to pull him over; officers said he was using an electronic device while driving before the Feb. The only agency determined to be discriminatory was the Oregon State Police.

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Image courtesy of "Yahoo Finance"

ChatGPT 'woke bias': AI program cheers Biden, not Trump; defines ... (Yahoo Finance)

Elon Musk said ChatGPT's bias is "extremely concerning" after it was reported the AI program praises Democrats but not Republicans and mentions "gender ...

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Image courtesy of "NPR"

COVID-19 made pulse oximeters ubiquitous. Engineers are fixing ... (NPR)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one measurement became more important than almost any other: blood oxygen saturation. It was the one concrete number that ...

Because the devices were designed and calibrated using lighter skin tones, the melanin in people with darker skin causes the oximeter to overestimate how much oxygenated blood they have — and to underestimate how severe a case of COVID-19 is. The audio version of this story was produced by Thomas Lu and edited by Gabriel Spitzer. "We are trying to exploit the polarization or electric field properties of light," Toussaint says. Aboelata has patients use an oximeter when they are healthy, creating a baseline to compare against when they are sick. This is where Carter, the pulmonologist, is lending her clinical knowhow. I wouldn't think of taking a pulse or a blood pressure without taking a pulse oximetry in my daily practice," says Dr. "They were tested in the eighties in a time when there was so little diversity in our clinical trials and testing." "I was surprised that, you know, in this day and time it was a persistent problem, especially since the pulse oximeter is such a ubiquitous tool for physicians," Toussaint says. The device shines two wavelengths of light into the finger. "Because skin pigmentation and other absorbers affect the measurement, the method is not capable of making absolute measurements," two scientists The few papers on racial bias in pulse oximeters were not reaching medical textbooks or top tier journals. [Noha Aboelata](https://rootsclinic.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NAboelata_CEO_bio.FINAL_.pdf), a family practice physician at the Roots Community Health Center.

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Image courtesy of "Phys.Org"

Research links negativity bias, investment apprehension (Phys.Org)

What do your worries about public health have to do with your financial well-being? Maybe a lot more than you realize, according to new research from ...

[research](https://phys.org/tags/research/) finds that lower-educated and lower-income individuals harbor an even stronger negativity bias on average, making these findings potentially important in mitigating wealth inequality. [lower-income families](https://phys.org/tags/lower-income+families/) build wealth, and improving general financial decision-making. Rather than trying to educate people to invest in the "For instance, in our research we are able to look back at previous studies with data on individuals' ambiguity aversion, perceived likelihood of dying of terrorism, anxiety levels, and optimism." Tapping into additional data from the panel, the research team accounted for risk aversion, optimism, ambiguity aversion, the impact of media coverage and naturally evolving views on stock market participation. Because of the panelists' history, the dataset allows researchers to connect seemingly unrelated data points through historical responses. To make those connections, the research team turned to additional data collected as part of the RAND American Life Panel, a panel of more than 5,000 respondents who researchers regularly survey. Conditions around the swine flu pandemic provided researchers the chance to dig into attitudes and better understand investor behavior. In "The Negativity Bias and Perceived Return Distributions: Evidence from a Pandemic," the Department of Finance and Real Estate's Harry Turtle and his co-authors examine the relation between people's attitudes toward swine flu and predictions about the market. Participation in beneficial financial opportunities is central to improving social welfare, including the mitigation of severe wealth inequality. "If you overestimate your belief of dying from swine flu, you're also more likely to be negatively biased in your beliefs about stock market returns," Turtle said. Maybe a lot more than you realize, according to new research from Colorado State University's College of Business.

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