it’s a bias if it keeps you from achieving your other values.
This is nonsense. I have a desire for ice cream, but also a desire to stick to my diet and lose weight. Oh no, my desire to stick to my diet is preventing my from achieving my desire for ice cream, it must be a bias!
Agreed, but nyan_sandwich touches on an interesting point.
Certainly, there are lots of situations where I have one set of cognitive structures that encourage me to behave one way (say, eating ice cream, or experimenting to discover what’s actually true about my environment, or whatever) and a different set encouraging me to behave a different way (say, avoiding empty calories, or having high confidence in what I was taught as a child, or whatever).
It seems to me that when I call one of those structures a “bias” I’m suggesting two things: first, that I don’t endorse it, and second, that it’s relatively broad in applicability.
But that in turn suggests that I can eliminate a bias simply by endorsing its conclusions, which is.. not uncontroversial.
If they conflict, one or the other is currently a ‘bias’. You get to decide which one you like more.
Is eating ice-cream more important than your desire to stay healthy? You must overcome your desire to stay healthy.
Is staying healthy more important than eating ice-cream? Then you must overcome the desire to eat ice-cream.
‘bias’ is a fuzzy category referring to the corner of the conflict*value space where value is low and conflict with other values is high. Stretched all the way over to ice-cream and health, it starts to lose meaning. Just talk about which one you want to overcome.
That’s really not how I would understand a bias. I would think of a bias as a feature of your psychology that distorts your decision-making process away from the rational; that is, optimal pursuit of your goals. The planning fallacy is a bias, having conflicting goals is just a feature of my utility function.
This is nonsense. I have a desire for ice cream, but also a desire to stick to my diet and lose weight. Oh no, my desire to stick to my diet is preventing my from achieving my desire for ice cream, it must be a bias!
Agreed, but nyan_sandwich touches on an interesting point.
Certainly, there are lots of situations where I have one set of cognitive structures that encourage me to behave one way (say, eating ice cream, or experimenting to discover what’s actually true about my environment, or whatever) and a different set encouraging me to behave a different way (say, avoiding empty calories, or having high confidence in what I was taught as a child, or whatever).
It seems to me that when I call one of those structures a “bias” I’m suggesting two things: first, that I don’t endorse it, and second, that it’s relatively broad in applicability.
But that in turn suggests that I can eliminate a bias simply by endorsing its conclusions, which is.. not uncontroversial.
If they conflict, one or the other is currently a ‘bias’. You get to decide which one you like more.
Is eating ice-cream more important than your desire to stay healthy? You must overcome your desire to stay healthy.
Is staying healthy more important than eating ice-cream? Then you must overcome the desire to eat ice-cream.
‘bias’ is a fuzzy category referring to the corner of the conflict*value space where value is low and conflict with other values is high. Stretched all the way over to ice-cream and health, it starts to lose meaning. Just talk about which one you want to overcome.
That’s really not how I would understand a bias. I would think of a bias as a feature of your psychology that distorts your decision-making process away from the rational; that is, optimal pursuit of your goals. The planning fallacy is a bias, having conflicting goals is just a feature of my utility function.