Comment on The Bottom Line

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:05:22 GMT

Define "effectiveness as a person" - in many cases the bias leading to the pre-written conclusion has some form of survival value (e.g. social survival). Due partly to childhood issues resulting in a period of complete? rejection of the value of emotions, I have an unusually high resistance to intellectual bias, yet on a number of measures of "effectiveness as a person" I do not seem to be measuring up well yet (on some others I seem to be doing okay).

Also, as I mentioned in my reply to the first comment, real world algorithms are often an amalgam of the two approaches, so it is not so much which algorithm as what weighting the approaches get. In most (if not all) people this weighting changes with the subject, not just with the person's general level of rationality/intellectual honesty.

As it is almost impossible to detect and neutralize all of one's biases and assumptions, and dangerous to attempt "counter-bias", arriving at a result known to be truly unbiased is rare. NOTE: Playing "Devil's Advocate" sensibly is not "counter-bias" and in a reasonable entity will help to reveal and neutralize bias.

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