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I'd agree there are plenty of stupid humans there (and elsewhere), but I'm not sure that a catalogue of heuristics with the apparent intent of lessening cogniti

I'd agree there are plenty of stupid humans there (and elsewhere), but I'm not sure that a catalogue of heuristics with the apparent intent of lessening cognitive bias is a worthy target for your ire. Maybe it would make more sense if you identified some actual problems with their pastiche philosophy.

TameAntelope 6y ago
I specifically don't like how the use of approximate estimations of certainty are used through Bayesian probability theory. My chief concern is that through the application of figures to beliefs, you hide the inputs to those beliefs behind something that appears more objective than it actually is, leading to a meaningfully less thorough examination of why you arrived at that figure. A secondary concern I have is that it falsely proposes that emotion isn't part of (or at least not playing a significant role in) a decision process, and that the more we eliminate emotion, the more successful our outcomes will be. I don't understand that to be the case at all, rather it seems clear that emotion is how we know when to stop collecting data and which data to select to include as relevant in our decision making process, and that is how bias creeps in. You end up in a position where you feel you've applied some kind of process for arriving at a decision, and your feeling is not correct, but because it feels correct, you don't examine it further.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply and I agree. I've found the "strong program" of postmodern science and technology studies to be a place where this is addressed. It is insufficient to claim that truth-believers believe things because they are true and falsehood-believers believe weird things because of psychological or material factors. Progress can only be made when we use the same rubric for evaluating people whether we agree with them or not. I feel that your concern with the motivating factors of emotion is apt. People do not believe things because they seem true, they believe things because those things help resolve tension between their own psyche, their own experiences, and their perception of the current and future worlds. If a program intended to mitigate human biases does not use the same rules for apparently true beliefs and apparently false beliefs, fails to account for the fact that truth-knowing persons are still just as biased as those in error, and denies the primal motivating factors that we call 'emotions', it will fall into error and fail to achieve its objective.

TameAntelope 6y ago

I specifically don't like how the use of approximate estimations of certainty are used through Bayesian probability theory. My chief concern is that through the application of figures to beliefs, you hide the inputs to those beliefs behind something that appears more objective than it actually is, leading to a meaningfully less thorough examination of why you arrived at that figure. A secondary concern I have is that it falsely proposes that emotion isn't part of (or at least not playing a significant role in) a decision process, and that the more we eliminate emotion, the more successful our outcomes will be. I don't understand that to be the case at all, rather it seems clear that emotion is how we know when to stop collecting data and which data to select to include as relevant in our decision making process, and that is how bias creeps in. You end up in a position where you feel you've applied some kind of process for arriving at a decision, and your feeling is not correct, but because it feels correct, you don't examine it further.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Thanks for the reply and I agree. I've found the "strong program" of postmodern science and technology studies to be a place where this is addressed. It is insufficient to claim that truth-believers believe things because they are true and falsehood-believers believe weird things because of psychological or material factors. Progress can only be made when we use the same rubric for evaluating people whether we agree with them or not. I feel that your concern with the motivating factors of emotion is apt. People do not believe things because they seem true, they believe things because those things help resolve tension between their own psyche, their own experiences, and their perception of the current and future worlds. If a program intended to mitigate human biases does not use the same rules for apparently true beliefs and apparently false beliefs, fails to account for the fact that truth-knowing persons are still just as biased as those in error, and denies the primal motivating factors that we call 'emotions', it will fall into error and fail to achieve its objective.