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turchin comments on Open thread, Jul. 04 - Jul. 10, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Meta-biases
Some cognitive biases don’t allow a person to see and cure his other biases. It results in biases accumulation and strongly distorted world picture. I tried to draw out a list of main meta-biases.
First and most important of them is overconfidence. Generalized overconfidence also is known as feeling of self-importance. It prevents a person from searching and indemnifying his own biases. He feels himself perfect. It is also called arrogance.
Stupidity. It is not a bias, but a (sort of very general) property of mind. It may include many psychiatric disorders, from dementia to depression.
Dogmatism: Unchangeable group of believes, often connected with believe in certain text or author.
Lack or reflectivity. Inability to think about own thinking.
Projection of responsibility. If one used to think that others are source of his problems, he is unable to see his own mistakes and make changes.
Lack of knowledge in logic, statistic, brain science, scientific method etc.
Psychopathic traits of character. They often combine many of above mentioned properties.
Learned helplessness. In this case a person may not believe that he is able to “debias” himself.
Hyperoptimisctic bias. If you want something very much, you will ignore all warnings.
Lack of motivation to self-improvement.
Obstinacy. A person may want to signal his high status by ignoring good advises and even facts, and try to demonstrate that he is “strong” in his believes.
Lesswrong had discussion on metabiases in comments to this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/d1u/the_new_yorker_article_on_cognitive_biases/
Any other suggestions?
A concept that I liked from Critical Rationalism was immunization strategies - ideological commitments and stratagems that make a theory unfalsifiable.
Look into those. I assume people must have lists of these things somewhere.
I don't think it's useful to mentally categorize "Lack of motivation to self-improvement" as a bias. Not everything is a bias.
It is technically true. But it is also one of the strongest obstacles. If one has motivation, he could overcome other his meta biases, if he doesn't, nothing would work.
In general the literature on congitive biases suggest that most real cognitive biases like the hindsight bias can't simply be overcome by motivation.
By simply calling everything a cognitive bias, it's easy to create the impression that a cognitive bias is simply an error in reasoning like any other error in reasoning.
You went to some ends to make the list comprehensive. I have only a few comments:
I don't think this strictly meets your requirement that it doesn't "allow a person to see and cure his other biases". Sure science helps but I think that many laymen already to profit from bias literature otherwise self-help books - some of which picking up biases wouldn't work. Or don't they? Maybe the point really is that the required preliminaries are so many or organized in such a way that you can't go there from here.
This is relatively broad. It can be seen to include 4, 5 and 10.
I also tried to come up with other options which was hard. Here is my try:
_11. Greed (or other highly focusing motivations like existential needs). Takes energy away from self improvement. This appears to be a special case of your 9 which I see as too general.
_12. Social pressure. Thinking about own fallacies may not be socially acceptable in the peer group. This is different from 2 -Dogmatism.
Maybe this list could be structured a bit into psychological, cognitive and belief structure items.
Minor nitpick: The formatting of the numbered list seems to be broken.
Thanks for your suggestions and nitpick.