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blossom comments on Your Strength as a Rationalist - Less Wrong
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Since I think evolution makes us quite fit to our current environment I don't think cognitive biases are design flaws, in the above example you imply that even if you had the information available to guess the truth, your guess was another one and it was false, therefore you experienced a flaw in your cognition.
My hypotheses is that reaching the truth or communicating it in the IRC may have not been the end objective of your cognitive process, in this case just to dismiss the issue as something that was not important anyway "so move on and stop wasting resources in this discussion" was maybe the "biological" objective and as such it should be correct, not a flaw.
If the above is true then all cognitive bias, simplistic heuristics, fallacies, and dark arts are good since we have conducted our lives for 200,000 years according to these and we are alive and kicking.
Rationality and our search to be LessWrong, which I support, may be tools we are developing to evolve in our competitive ability within our species, but not a "correction" of something that is wrong in our design.
They're design flaws insofar as that there are far better possibilities. Just because something doesn't fail entirely, doesn't mean its design is any good.
This is the same as above. This might also be relevant.
Many of us do not (consciously) want to gain competitive advantages compared to other people but rather raise the sanity waterline.