Yes, some people are (a lot) more wrong than others, but I doubt it is due to specific rampant biases so much as a general tendency to not error check via multiple empirical pathways (eg).Īnd it matters because these sorts of models of thought and reasoning suggest a very different approach to being more right than traditional education and critical thinking: instead, we have these dozens or hundreds of "hardwired" errors that each need to be patrolled and corrected through some sort of self-help-run-amok practice of memorization and self-policing. Yeah, in some cases heuristics, as with everything, go wrong, but most of these seems like idiosyncratic cases carefully designed to go wrong, like optical illusions, rather than general flaws in reasoning. ![]() It's interesting to think about what life would be like without each of these "biases." Almost all of them seem not only generally useful, but almost logically necessary for any intelligent entity operating in the real world.Ĭategory 1 basically says we tend to weight more heavily the things we already know than the things we don't, or notice contrasts 2 says we find patterns with sparse data or (as in 1) project what we know onto the world 3 say we prefer simplicity and reduce complex probability distributions to more certain and simple distributions and 4 says we simplify (as in 3) the data when digesting and remembering it.Īll of these seem like totally reasonable and useful heuristics, useful even to the point of being more often right than wrong and to the point where I doubt whether one could generally characterize the conditions under which they are not applicable.
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