That specific thesis is mostly just an example. Much of what I would say would be paraphrasing the work of someone else (Lee Jussim mainly) and explaining its relevance to this community. I could do this if people thought it would be productive, but its just one of many topics that I think are misunderstood on a large scale.
My more general interest is in the less-known fact that many of our hardwired biases and heuristics were designed by natural selection (e.g., negativity bias) to improve accuracy based on goal-relevant criteria. It also seems that the biases formed in response to the environment (e.g., much of the content comprising a stereotype) track reality to a surprising degree. Imagine a marksman who practices shooting at the same firing range everyday and this range generally has a side-wind in the same direction and intensity. The marksman can manually adjust for this by placing his reticle upwind of the target, but he could also adjust his scope's reticle such that he can aim for the bulls-eye and account for the wind at the same time. Once the adjustment is made to the scope, he many have a "biased" tool, but his shots are still centered on the bullseye (on average) and the only online calculations needed to account for the wind on a shot-by-shot basis are minute. What if the marksman moves to another range? Well, in time, he will see his shots wildly missing and make the proper adjustments. This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made. It's not that biases and heuristics don't cause problems, its that we have a much poorer understanding of when they cause problems than our field claims.
This general idea applies to stereotypes, but also:
In these spheres people generally understand that heuristics optimize for something. Frequently people think they optimize for some ancestral environment that's quite unlike the world we are living in at the moment. I think that's a question where a well written post would be very useful.
This is probably not a novel analogy, but the surprising thing to me is that social psychology tends to frame any "reticle adjustment" as a bias against which we must fight without testing its performance in the contexts under which the adjustment was made.
I...
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
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