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siodine comments on Another Real World Example of Cognitive Bias - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: billswift 31 January 2012 10:31PM

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Comment author: siodine 02 February 2012 04:05:52PM *  0 points [-]

Of course I don't think training away something is the same as willing away something. I'm making a distinction between training for something and succeeding at that something.

A fat person can train in a way similar to how we would train to avoid biases. They might strategize for the future knowing they would fail otherwise--like we might fail to recognize a bias we know we have. For example, they might plan a healthy grocery list for the entire month because they knew without that strategy they'd buy a lot of junk food. However, like Markowitz, they still end up failing given their training; fat people's will fails them and they deviate from their strategy. So, I wonder if biases are similar in this way. One way to find this out, I think, is to drain people's will power (it's a finite resource) and see if they're more susceptible to biases.