Kutta comments on Adaptive bias - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
Please take note of the wording: "reject all bias as evil".
That is, lumping all demonstrated instances of bias into a general category of "ugh, I should avoid doing this" is likely to keep us from looking into the interesting adaptive properties of specific biases.
When confronted with a specific bias, the useful thing to do is recognize that it introduces error in particular contexts but may remain adaptive in other contexts. We will then strive to adopt prescriptive approaches, selected according to context, which help correct for observed bias and bring our cognition into line with the desired normative frameworks - which themselves differ from context to context.
I meant that it's the specific underlying mechanisms that can produce a bias or promote correctness; a bias is just a surface level fact about what errors people tend to make. Also, lots of biases are specific to a certain mental task and cannot be interpreted in foreign contexts. It's not guaranteed either that a current "bias" concept will not be superseded by additional knowledge. Therefore, the ideal basis of debiasing is most likely a detailed understanding of psychology/neurology; which is a point you expressed, and I agree.