Guild Pain Point#2 : Bias & Noise
The Obstacle that we Deny Exists …but it’s Out There
Author: Sean Moffitt. Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
“From military chiefs, to presiding judges, to moneyballing coaches, to titans of industry, to policy-wielding polticos and to everyday professionals, we all swim in a lake of human and technology-aided judgements. We can and we should attempt to make better less biased and less noisy decisions in our business, civic and personal lives.”
Grey Swan Guild’s Seven Pain Points for Making Better Sense of the World
These are the seven things that confront our mission. We obsess about them. We seek to overcome them. We seek to navigate around them. We seek to alleviate the bad consequences of them.
We are profiling our second one here, it could be the one we are most in denial and oblivious about — it’s Bias & Noise.
II. Bias and Noise
The two cousins of bias and noise are well-noted in their ability to make us feel overconfident in our decisions and beliefs when we shouldn’t be, and pointing to how flaws in human and organizational behaviour can produce less accurate, less credible and less fair results. We often hold illusory superiority assumptions here where we think ourselves to be superior in terms of our capabilities and qualities than the others. This is a psychological tendency of overestimating our own capabilities, biases and personal noisiness.
With trust of sources and people on the decline, truthiness, populism, and demagoguery on the rise, there is a general lack of rational thinking applied to our major states of affairs. These effects have all been amplified by social media and AI technology that can magnify and accelerate the impact of fake or biased news.
Facets of our Pain Point Bias and Noise:
The Guild has dealt with many types of bias and noise head on that get in the way of knowledge and decisions. Some of the leading aspects of these flaws in human (and now technology-based) judgement we take on are:
- Certainty Effects — the predisposition for people to overweight outcomes that are certain compared to those that are merely probable or Grey Swans.
- Confirmation Bias — a tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
- Observer Bias — the sponsor’s or researcher’s expectations unduly influence the outcome of a study’s conclusions.
- Anchoring Bias — an inclination to rely too heavily on the first pieces of information encountered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.
- Overconfidence Bias — to be more confident. and certain in one’s abilities or the accuracy of one’s knowledge than is objectively justified.
- Groupthink — the desire for harmony or conformity leads to irrational, dysfunctional decisions. without critically evaluating alternative viewpoints.
- Cultural Bias — the phenomenon where people interpret and judge phenomena according to standards inherent to their own culture.
- Emotional Bias — the influence of an individual’s emotions on their decisions and judgments, often leading to irrational or suboptimal outcomes.
- Blindspots — unconscious biases where someone may be oblivious to certain faults, errors, or truths, that can lead to poor performance and leadership.
- Epistemic Noise — noise and errors in judgement due to lack of knowledge, which can be reduced with the arrival of more data and input.
- Undesirable Varibility — noise and errors due to unwanted level, pattern, and occasion noise, surfacing lack of judgement fairness and accountability.
The Guild’s Response to Bias & Noise
The Guild’s answer to bias and noise is balance — providing a range of views, people, sources and tools that smooth out unwanted bias and overconfidence,
We do this through:
Experiences — Events: one of our four key marquee events of the year is our annual April Day of the Swan, a 24 hour continuous event where we expose flaws in our collective thinking and connect better dots.
Intelligence: we have a standing global panel of analysts and researchers The Global League of Sensemakers,The Global League of Sensemakers that stand as our guardians against bias and noise.
Community: we have a monthly forum of the GSG Book Club that choose books that confornt their current points of views and explore all sides of a topic
Ventures: we are building a venture that inventories over 750 knowledge and decision-making methods and approaches that chooses not what’s popular but what’s most appropriate for your particular situation called The Compass and Compendium.
Read up on the other Pain Point posts
Pain Points for Making Sense of the World Overview : https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pain-points-making-better-sense-world-grey-swan-guild-sgyhc/?trackingId=IP3ZMBOVALVZK5XWblGMag%3D%3D
Uncertainty — Pain Point #1
Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action
if you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and ourparticular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild Linkedin page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is the form.
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in July. Here’s the link.
