Bias Busters: Teaching Language Agents to Think Like Scientists
TL;DR for operators Language-model agents do not merely make wrong causal guesses. In this paper, they gather evidence in a biased way, then interpret that evidence through the same bias. That is the uncomfortable part. The study turns the classic Blicket Test from developmental psychology into a text-based active exploration game for LM agents. The agent must test objects, observe whether a machine turns on, then infer which objects are “Blickets” and whether the hidden rule is disjunctive — any Blicket activates the machine — or conjunctive — all relevant Blickets must be present together.1 ...