Summary: A perspective that synthesises biases with other considerations incl. game theory, virtue ethics and knowledge of your limitations.

Intro: Adopting a way of thinking in which you are aware of your own biases is clearly important and one of the areas of rationality that is most based solid evidential grounds. However, this also needs to be reconciled with evolutionary psychology arguments that are psychological functioning has evolved to maximise our reproductive fitness, a big part of which is survival. This post attempts to synthesise these two views. I would also like to suggest a new term, De-Centering Bias to describe this technique given how it marks a shift from bias being the central explanation, to bias having to share the stage with other considerations. The best way to understand this is by example:

(This post was originally title Post-Bias Thinking (or Post-Bias-ism). Unsurprisingly, this was controversial, so I decided to rename it.)

Example 1, one of the most famous experiments in psychology is the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, which was originally interpreted as showing that children who could resist eating one marshmallow now for the promise of two later tended to have better life outcomes. However, later interpretations showed that this could actually be rational for children in some environments where such promises were not reliable and that the presence of such an environment could explain these results by being a common cause of both effects.

Example 2, often revenge will make people take actions that harm both them and the other person. If we model an actor as a self-interested rational agent then we will come to the conclusion that they are being "irrational". On the other hand, if an actor is willing to go to such extreme lengths to punish someone who wrongs them, then there is a strong incentive not to wrong them in the first place (Scott has argued that it could be considered charitable because it also created a disincentive within the wider community). In the Most Convenient World, the actor will gain the benefits of such a threat existing, whilst never having to carry out their threat.

Example 3, the sunk cost fallacy is the tendency of humans to want to continue a project that they have invested a lot of resources (time, money, effort) into, even if the project is not valuable enough to be worth the resources requi...