Mere fact that the resources are finite is enough reason to use heuristics and—inevitably—biases.
If there are hundreds of comments I am not able to fully reaseach, I need to use some filters. Such as “trust the comments from people from the beginning of the alphabet and ignore the comments from people from the end of the alphabet” or “trust the comments from respected long-time users and ignore the comments from unknown new users”. Obviously, some of these heuristics are much reliable than the others, but none of them is perfect.
Then, as abstractly thinking people we may play the game on a higher level, inventing meta-heuristics for accepting or rejecting heuristics. Such as: “if a more experienced member of my tribe recommends me a heuristic, I will use it; and I will ignore the heuristics promoted from unknown people or other tribes”. Actually, this seems like a decent heuristic; you probably won’t find a better one with comparable simplicity. And one of its consequences is that when an experienced member says “ignore concern trolls”, you follow that. Plus you need some operational definition of what a concern troll is, which is something like: “expresses concern for our tribe, but does not pattern-match to a typical member of our tribe”. There.
It’s imperfect because all heuristics are imperfect.
And of course smart people always find a way to abuse it. Because all imperfect rules can be abused creatively. For example some people may start using it as a fully general counteragument against anyone who disagrees with them and happens to have lower status in given community.
And the only way to fix it would be to send all internet users to CFAR’s reeducation camps. Which, unfortunately, are still under construction. :P
Mere fact that the resources are finite is enough reason to use heuristics and—inevitably—biases.
If there are hundreds of comments I am not able to fully reaseach, I need to use some filters. Such as “trust the comments from people from the beginning of the alphabet and ignore the comments from people from the end of the alphabet” or “trust the comments from respected long-time users and ignore the comments from unknown new users”. Obviously, some of these heuristics are much reliable than the others, but none of them is perfect.
Then, as abstractly thinking people we may play the game on a higher level, inventing meta-heuristics for accepting or rejecting heuristics. Such as: “if a more experienced member of my tribe recommends me a heuristic, I will use it; and I will ignore the heuristics promoted from unknown people or other tribes”. Actually, this seems like a decent heuristic; you probably won’t find a better one with comparable simplicity. And one of its consequences is that when an experienced member says “ignore concern trolls”, you follow that. Plus you need some operational definition of what a concern troll is, which is something like: “expresses concern for our tribe, but does not pattern-match to a typical member of our tribe”. There.
It’s imperfect because all heuristics are imperfect.
And of course smart people always find a way to abuse it. Because all imperfect rules can be abused creatively. For example some people may start using it as a fully general counteragument against anyone who disagrees with them and happens to have lower status in given community.
And the only way to fix it would be to send all internet users to CFAR’s reeducation camps. Which, unfortunately, are still under construction. :P