![]() The very same software could do lower-case string matching which 'confuses' lower and upper case, using the hashes. The point is not that it necessarily happens, the point is that if the larger space is mapped to a smaller space, that's by itself doesn't mean there will be collisions. I'd say, people just tend to assume by default there's some correlation between two things - either they assume it is positive (so pretty, must be nice), or they assume it is negative (so pretty, must be evil or spoiled or the like), and just a few people assume it is zero by default. Still could usually be a fallacy, of course, some sort of signal leakage between 'good looks' and 'good somethingelse'. But they can in principle avoid collisions.įor the halo effect you're speaking of, it is the case that positive qualities weakly correlate - at least the good looks and intelligence do, then the intelligence generally correlates with niceness in so much as intelligence prevents grossly un-nice behaviour that hurts everyone including that person. Not that our brains necessarily work like this. Even a couple hundred bits is enough to define space so vast, that you can map anything you encounter in your life to it, and never see a collision. Just because something maps large space to a smaller space, doesn't mean any collisions will actually happen. I don't expect it to ever encounter collision, though. There are very many pieces of program code that correspond to same hash. My hope is that we can relief evolution from the burden of having to explain so many things and focus more on structural explanations, which provide a working model for possible applications and a better understanding.Ī revision control system I use (GIT) uses 128 bit hashes to identify a much longer piece of program code. But the degree of 'throwing things in one pot' will depend on how much we learn about those things and increase our representation dimensionality. Since evolution can only modify the existing brain structure but cannot get away from the neural network 'design', the halo effect is a necessary by-product of human thinking. Since we differentiate concepts more when we are learning about a subject, the above reasoning should imply that children and people with less education in a certain area should be more influenced by this (generalized) halo effect in that area. When one of those mental structures is activated, the 'closed ones' will be activated to a certain degree as well. Other concepts that we acquire during our life and associate with positive emotions, like kindness and honesty are mapped to 'nearby' neural structures. This shouldn't be a surprise, since 'positive' ('feels good') seems to be one of the evolutionary hard-wired concepts. Profiles rated higher on scales of attractiveness, are also rated higher on scales of talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence. The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive traits are correlated. Now compare this to the following passage from here. (This is also a consequence of how the brain actually builds representations from sense inputs.) In terms of computational efficiency it makes sense to use overlapping set of neurons with similar activation level to represent similar concepts. (If you know some Linear Algebra, you can think of this as a projection from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space.) This is done more or less automatically by the limitation of our senses and brain's structure as a neural network.Īn immediate consequence of this observation is that there will be many states of the world, which are mapped to an almost identical inner representation. One crucial property of the brain is that it has to map a (essentially infinite) high-dimensional reality onto a finite low-dimensional internal representation. My hope is that this approach will be useful to understand the halo effect more systematically and shows that thinking in evolutionary terms is not always the best way to think about certain biases. I want to introduce a simple model, which relates the halo effect to a structural property of the brain. I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction? Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. ![]() When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology.
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