The only remedy I know of is to cultivate enjoying being wrong. This involves giving up a good bit of one’s self-concept as a highly intelligent individual. This gets easier if you remember that everyone else is also doing their thinking with a monkey brain that can barely chin itself on rationality.
Some thoughts:
I have less trouble with this than most, and the areas where I do notice it arising lead me toward an interesting speculation.
I’m status blind: I very rarely, and mostly only when I was much younger, worry about looking like an idiot/failing publicly etc etc. There is no perceived/felt social cost to me of being wrong, and it often feels good to explicitly call out when I’m wrong in a social context—it feels like finding your way again after being lost.
I generally follow the ‘strong opinions, loosely held’ strategy—I guess at least partly because the shortest path to the right answer is often to be confidently wrong on the internet and wait for someone to correct you :D
However...
Where I do notice the ‘ick field’ arising, where I do notice motivated reasoning coming out in force—is in my relationships. Which makes total sense—being ‘wrong’ about my choice of life partner is hugely costly, so much is built on top of that belief.
Evaluating your relationships is often bad for your relationships; a common piece of relationship advice is ‘Don’t Keep Score’.
Perhaps relationships are a kind of self-fulfiling self-deception—they work because we engage in motivated reasoning, because we commit ‘irrationally’. Or at least this strategy results in better outcomes than we would have otherwise if we’d been more rational.
And with my rough idea of the evolutionary environment, this makes total sense: you don’t choose your family, your tribe, often even your partner. If we weren’t engaging in a whole bunch of motivated reasoning, the most important foundation of our survival/wellbeing—social bonds—would be significantly weakened.
And that ties in neatly with a common theme in the conversation around ‘biases’ - that they’re features, not bugs.
Some thoughts:
I have less trouble with this than most, and the areas where I do notice it arising lead me toward an interesting speculation.
I’m status blind: I very rarely, and mostly only when I was much younger, worry about looking like an idiot/failing publicly etc etc. There is no perceived/felt social cost to me of being wrong, and it often feels good to explicitly call out when I’m wrong in a social context—it feels like finding your way again after being lost.
I generally follow the ‘strong opinions, loosely held’ strategy—I guess at least partly because the shortest path to the right answer is often to be confidently wrong on the internet and wait for someone to correct you :D
However...
Where I do notice the ‘ick field’ arising, where I do notice motivated reasoning coming out in force—is in my relationships. Which makes total sense—being ‘wrong’ about my choice of life partner is hugely costly, so much is built on top of that belief.
Evaluating your relationships is often bad for your relationships; a common piece of relationship advice is ‘Don’t Keep Score’.
Perhaps relationships are a kind of self-fulfiling self-deception—they work because we engage in motivated reasoning, because we commit ‘irrationally’. Or at least this strategy results in better outcomes than we would have otherwise if we’d been more rational.
And with my rough idea of the evolutionary environment, this makes total sense: you don’t choose your family, your tribe, often even your partner. If we weren’t engaging in a whole bunch of motivated reasoning, the most important foundation of our survival/wellbeing—social bonds—would be significantly weakened.
And that ties in neatly with a common theme in the conversation around ‘biases’ - that they’re features, not bugs.