I realize this question is contrived, but I figure it might provoke some fun discussion, so here goes:
If you could push a button and have your brain modified to precisely remove a cognitive bias (and have no other unnecessary effects—most convenient possible world), which would you choose? Why?
What if you were choosing for the whole human race?
The problem is that we 'judge others', i.e., their personalities, on the basis of behavior that maybe was just a one-off.
Yes, it is, and when I feel bad, I always try to not let it influence how I treat others. But the problem is that on the rare occasions when I fail, others judge me as a person on the basis of that one failure. I'm normally polite and friendly to everyone, but maybe one day I'm grumpy and impatient, because I have a bad headache and I am in a hurry to take my sick cat to the vet. Then when they meet me that day, people think I'm always like that. They don't see me as someone in a bad mood who has let it influence her behavior that one day (that would be correct), they think that it is the way I am, and that I always behave like that, and that's where they go wrong.
But allowing ourselves one-offs is a personality problem, lack of really strong principles. Of course it is something average people do, so it is not predictive, but that simply means average morality is still not good enough, and we are not good enough to escape judgement if we have an average personality. Average personalities are far too unprincipled.
OK I get it... (read more)