Counter Biassing: Counter balance your biases to try be unbiased

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By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 4 mins

Summary: Unbiased = 1. Know of cognitive biases + 2. Proactively counter for cognitive biases = Counter Biassing. 

  • Counter balancing your biases = Counter Biassing

  • Probably the best you can do is to be low biassed. So aim for this. 

  • Jingle: I don’t want to be right, I want to be less wrong. 

  • Jingle 2: If you don’t want to be an ass, consider counter biassing.

  • “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Charlie Munger. 

Example 1: Confirmation Bias => Run Anti Confirmation Bias

  • See this blog for full details: Anti Confirmation Bias: to be unbiased you need to bias your bias

  • Confirmation bias = the tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.

  • Anti confirmation bias = IMO what is needed to counter ‘confirmation bias’ to attempt to be unbiased

  • Confirmation bias = overweighting information on why your idea is correct and underweighting information that goes against your idea

  • Anti confirmation bias = looking for how your idea can be wrong (AKA ego distortions)

  • Anti confirmation bias = looking for what you have missed (AKA blind spots)

  • Jingle: to be unbiased you need to bias your bias.


Example 2: Dunning Kruger

  • The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person's lack of knowledge and skills in a certain area cause them to overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task is simple for everyone, and underestimate their relative abilities as well. 

  • Dunning Kruger = People of low competence mistakenly think they have high competence because they don’t know there is better. 

  • Dunning Kruger can be characterised as someone with Novice level understanding has Master level confidence.

  • Ideally: Knowledge levels ≃ Confidence levels

  • As a rule of thumb I think it takes 1s of hours to have novice level understanding, 10s to have competent, 100s to be proficient, 1,000s of hours to be an expert and 10,000s of hours to be a Master. 

  • So if you have 1s of hours of understanding about something (eg you have heard about something being discussed in the mainstream media here and there) then likely you have Novice levels of understanding, and you should Novice levels of confidence in your view (aka very low confidence and be looking to update your views when you encounter new new info). 

  • Countering for Dunning Kruger = 1. Trying to recognise your levels of knowledge + 2. Having an appropriate amount of confidence for the level of knowledge. 

  • “I’m not young enough to know the answer anymore.” AKA I’m not a Novice anymore, so I get there is much nuance here, and that as a Novice I had large ego distortions and blind spots that meant any views I had were likely quite off. 

  • The more I know, the less I know. 

  • Ignorance often begets confidence far more than knowledge does. 


If you only take away one thing

  • “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

  • It’s not the person most steadfast in their views that improves humanity the most, it is the one who is most able to counter biases and update their views to be less wrong as much as possible. 

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A list of well known Cognitive Biases