Douglas_Knight2 comments on Human Evil and Muddled Thinking - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 September 2007 11:43PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight2 16 September 2007 11:07:00PM 1 point [-]

Tom Myers,
I think the convention on this blog, among the small set of people who have such a precise definition, is that not every heuristic is a bias, that only heuristics whose errors are worth overcoming should be called biases. I don't like this usage. For one thing, it's really hard to know the cost of overcoming particular biases. It's easy to look at an isolated experiment and say: here's a procedure that would have been better, but that doesn't cover cost of actually changing your behavior to look out for this kind of error.

Also, there are other people on this blog that use bias to refer to systematic, but unexplained errors, where it's hard to call them heuristics. Without a mechanism, it's probably hard to overcome these, although not always impossible.