Bias caused by fallacious belief that greater precision implies greater accuracy
Precision bias also known as numeracy bias is a form of cognitive bias[1] in which an evaluator of information commits a logical fallacy as the result of confusing accuracy and precision.[2] More particularly, in assessing the merits of an argument, a measurement, or a report, an observer or assessor falls prey to precision bias when they believe that greater precision implies greater accuracy (i.e., that simply because a statement is precise, it is also true); the observer or assessor are said to provide false precision.[3][4]
The clustering illusion[5] and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy[6] may both be treated as relatives of precision bias. In these related fallacies, precision is mistakenly considered evidence of causation, when in fact the clustered information may actually be the result of randomness.
^Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2011), held in Boston, USA 20-32 July 2011 / L. Carlson, C. Hoelscher and T. Shipley (eds.): pp.1521-1526
^"Practices of Science: Precision vs. Accuracy | manoa.hawaii.edu/ExploringOurFluidEarth". manoa.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
^Lim, Daniel; DeSteno, David (2020). "Past adversity protects against the numeracy bias in compassion". Emotion. 20 (8): 1344–1356. doi:10.1037/emo0000655. ISSN 1931-1516. PMID 31414833. S2CID 198166331.
^Jerez-Fernandez, Alexandra; Angulo, Ashley N.; Oppenheimer, Daniel M. (2014). "Show Me the Numbers: Precision as a Cue to Others' Confidence". Psychological Science. 25 (2): 633–635. doi:10.1177/0956797613504301. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 24317423. S2CID 43824955.
^Howard, Jonathan (2019), "Illusionary Correlation, False Causation, and Clustering Illusion", Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 265–283, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-93224-8_15, ISBN 978-3-319-93223-1, S2CID 150016878, retrieved 2022-10-22
^Thompson, W. C. (2009-09-01). "Painting the target around the matching profile: the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in forensic DNA interpretation". Law, Probability and Risk. 8 (3): 257–276. doi:10.1093/lpr/mgp013. ISSN 1470-8396.
Precisionbias also known as numeracy bias is a form of cognitive bias in which an evaluator of information commits a logical fallacy as the result of...
plays a central role, prefers to use the terms bias and variability instead of accuracy and precision: bias is the amount of inaccuracy and variability is...
leads to overconfidence in the accuracy, named precisionbias. Madsen Pirie defines the term "false precision" in a more general way: when exact numbers are...
interpreting the floating-point number, the bias is subtracted to retrieve the actual exponent. For a half-precision number, the exponent is stored in the range...
(DeltaP). Accuracy is a weighted arithmetic mean of Precision and Inverse Precision (weighted by Bias) as well as a weighted arithmetic mean of Recall and...
treatment effect against a measure of study precision. It is used primarily as a visual aid for detecting bias or systematic heterogeneity. A symmetric inverted...
may allow speedier choices when speed is more valuable than precision. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, coming...
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Extended precision refers to floating-point number formats that provide greater precision than the basic floating-point formats. Extended precision formats...
In statistics, the bias of an estimator (or bias function) is the difference between this estimator's expected value and the true value of the parameter...
experiments that attempt to mitigate the decision heuristic of anchoring bias is either marginally significant or not successful at all, it can be found...
machine learning-based tools for precision medicine. Precision medicine may be susceptible to subtle forms of algorithmic bias. For example, the presence of...
between the domain and range. With finite precision (or a discrete domain), this translates to removing bias. A rounding method should have utility in...
Length time bias (or length bias) is an overestimation of survival duration due to the relative excess of cases detected that are asymptomatically slowly...
represented exactly. Further, the exponent is not represented directly, but a bias is added so that the smallest representable exponent is represented as 1...
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