We are bias

[ZenRaiden]

A lot of research on bias, was well summed up by one sentence.
"We are the bias" ergo bias is part of human identity.
I looked at bias through a lens of "how to fix it", but what was truly remarkable is that our minds although cognitively can know the truth, our more primitive primal brain does not let us act against our own bias.

One of the most common and yet most insidious biases that exist are confirmation bias, and red herring.
Confirmation bias, basically amounts to "If I look behind me there will be something" a lo and behold I look behind and there is something.
So anytime we are in situations where there is a feeling like there is something behind us, our minds assume its true.
This is in short paranoia. The cost of being wrong in such cases is actually low, but on flip side cost of being right is high.
It means if someone assumes look behind me there is a lion I am liable to look there 100 times, even if the chance is 1 percent true, it still saves our life. Hence why inducing paranoia in people is so easy. Mistrust and so on.

Red Herring is something used in today's media virtually all the damn time.
Its saying "Look an airplane" and you look all the while the discussion is about cars.
Conceptually this disintegrates human intellect. If one falls to this type of thinking, it does not matter how many university degrees one has, or how smart one is. It bludgeons your ability to reason to nth degree.

So why are humans susceptible to this bias. Well the answer is, sometimes in the past when we had too few information any new fact could mean a lot to us. Today coherent sizeable set of data is where the juice is at. The trouble is in the past we were so deprived of information that red herring actually made us more focused on what matters.
In reality this means we often did not miss out on new info.
What today wins out over this is coherence.
Unfortunately coherence it self is rife with biases.

So undoing bias is hard.
When it comes to many biases I have seen in life is that biases are actually many times good.
Other people operate on biases as well. Which means we often use biases too. Not because its necessarily true, but if the herd believes X to be true, accepting their bias is survival mechanism.

That is why individual intellect often stands distant to herd mentality, and why the word herd mentality is often derogatory.
Because while there is strength in numbers, we are actually like sheep herded into and shoe horned into a certain common mindset. Deviating from that mindset in increasingly herd mentality society is dangerous.

People feel safer in groups and in herd mentality mindsets. We often have to accept that as individuals and our own perception is always superseded by groups. Which kind of means in groups our intellect is often kind of low.

 

[dr froyd]

yea biases are definitely adaptations, but the bad thing is that they are adaptations to an environment that no longer exists.

herd mentality made sense - if you and your tribe get lost in the jungle and decide on the wrong direction that's bad, but nevertheless you're with your tribe and most of you will survive. If you go alone in the wrong direction you are 100% dead. In fact even if you go in the right direction alone you're also probably dead.

nowadays we are exposed to a different kind of elements - financial decisions, professional decisions, etc etc. In these things, a bias often simply means a flaw in the decision making and subsequent suboptimal results.

side note: its always fascinating to think about all those who got weeded out of the gene pool for not having whatever adaptations we ended up with. At some point there must have been that one free-thinking dude who went his own direction in the jungle but ended up being eaten by a tiger or whatever. My hat's off to him though

 

[Black Rose]

a bias is an asymmetry in cognition

bias has the function of understanding the environment so really it ain't that bad until we come across an environment where that asymmetry becomes maladaptive. a lack of information can create bias but also cognition may be and is asymmetrical in many ways we cannot see in ourselves. whereas understanding requires a symmetry of sorts means we can think logically and rationally about certain things but not others. bias can add to creativity but detract from intelligence.

 

[ZenRaiden]

bias can add to creativity but detract from intelligence.

Good that you bring this up, because I was often thinking how we view bias as not intelligent.
The trouble is the bias is often IS what drives our intelligence.

For example have you ever considered what drives your intellect forward? Is it the understanding or the fundamental bias?

I think it is the bias that is the driver of life, but essentially intelligence merely sometimes corrects for it.

In some sense correcting for certain bias might actually reduce the drive. Kind of like this....

 

[scorpiomover]

A lot of research on bias, was well summed up by one sentence.
"We are the bias" ergo bias is part of human identity.
I looked at bias through a lens of "how to fix it", but what was truly remarkable is that our minds although cognitively can know the truth, our more primitive primal brain does not let us act against our own bias.

My experience is that a lot of this stuff is almost like it comes with a training manual, or should do, but a lot of people ignore the manual.

One of the most common and yet most insidious biases that exist are confirmation bias, and red herring.
Confirmation bias, basically amounts to "If I look behind me there will be something" a lo and behold I look behind and there is something.

Yes. But haven't you ever been walking, worried about someone or something behind you, looked back, and saw nothing?

Confirmation bias is about looking behind you, seeing nothing, and then coming up with a justification about why it's still there anyway. It's all about believing your bias cannot be wrong, to the extent of invalidating the evidence that contradicts your biases and corrects your perceptions of the universe.

So anytime we are in situations where there is a feeling like there is something behind us, our minds assume its true.
This is in short paranoia. The cost of being wrong in such cases is actually low, but on flip side cost of being right is high.
It means if someone assumes look behind me there is a lion I am liable to look there 100 times, even if the chance is 1 percent true, it still saves our life. Hence why inducing paranoia in people is so easy. Mistrust and so on.

Yes. But again, if someone looks behind them, doesn't see a lion, and then thinks "Oh, it's probably hiding", then that person ignores what they see.

If one day, they're in a good mood and don't want to believe a lion is around, if they look back and see a lion, they could just as easily say to themselves that it's "probably a man in a lion suit. Nothing to worry about."

Red Herring is something used in today's media virtually all the damn time.
Its saying "Look an airplane" and you look all the while the discussion is about cars.
Conceptually this disintegrates human intellect. If one falls to this type of thinking, it does not matter how many university degrees one has, or how smart one is. It bludgeons your ability to reason to nth degree.

Then Red Herrings are things we should ignore, and the things that are displaced by them are the things we should be looking at.

So if the media is full of Red Herrings, then the media are showing all the valueless and harmful things, and not showing the things we are better off paying attention to. You might as well be saying that watching any amount of media is harmful, and the best thing anyone can do is turn our attention to quite literally anything else, and so anything is better than the media.

So why are humans susceptible to this bias. Well the answer is, sometimes in the past when we had too few information any new fact could mean a lot to us.

We evolved to live in the jungle. But no-one taught us how to live in a concrete jungle (city).

The dangers are different (no snakes, lots of cars). So we try to treat cities as if the dangers are similar to what we have evolved to deal with. But when they are not the same, our reactions don't make sense with the situation.

Today coherent sizeable set of data is where the juice is at. The trouble is in the past we were so deprived of information that red herring actually made us more focused on what matters.
In reality this means we often did not miss out on new info.
What today wins out over this is coherence.
Unfortunately coherence it self is rife with biases.

So undoing bias is hard.

Yes. Undoing bias is hard. However, historically, the subjects that people developed to sift good data from bad, and to remove cognitive biases and mistakes from data, were called logic and mathematics. So as long as you use Ti and Si properly, then whatever they show you, will correct for your biases.

However, what Ti & Si will show you, can be extremely different from this world, and can at first glance look extremely terrifying. However, with Ne and Fe, you can Ne imagine a way to navigate the reality, and can introduce good feelings about how you can still have a good time in an apocalyptic nightmare.

When it comes to many biases I have seen in life is that biases are actually many times good.
Other people operate on biases as well. Which means we often use biases too. Not because its necessarily true, but if the herd believes X to be true, accepting their bias is survival mechanism.

That is why individual intellect often stands distant to herd mentality, and why the word herd mentality is often derogatory.
Because while there is strength in numbers, we are actually like sheep herded into and shoe horned into a certain common mindset. Deviating from that mindset in increasingly herd mentality society is dangerous.

People feel safer in groups and in herd mentality mindsets. We often have to accept that as individuals and our own perception is always superseded by groups. Which kind of means in groups our intellect is often kind of low.

Both individualism and being part of a herd have advantages. If you're part of a herd of wildebeest, when you cross a river, only a few of the millions get eaten by the crocodiles, and so you have a 1 in a million chance of being eaten.

OTOH, if you don't look after yourself, the herd eats but not you.

 

[birdsnestfern]

I wish there were written cultural rules and examples that you could easily learn so it isn't so hard to blend in. The hardest part is trying to learn a new culture when you were not born into it. Even just the culture of being human is so complicated - it eludes if you aren't aware of the thousands of nuances and rules of it. Lets say you are white and you try to communicate with a black family. There are always undercurrents that you weren't raised in that will create rifts and you will NEVER know all of these - it could be as simple as a certain facial expression that a black Mother uses with her kids and you don't know what that means so you are never going to be part of that culture or really get it. And Southern white women have so many unwritten rules even if there were a book (there are some!) you would still never really pick up all those nuances. You really have to be brought up in a culture to get it. My Mother could give me an under the table signal that would tell me a thousand words without saying a thing when we were in the company of people and she was trying to signal me a message, that sort of thing. Only I would understand that and nobody else at the table. I happened to snap a photo of everyone at the table with Moms finger signal and the different facial expressions on each person told an entire story of undercurrents of feelings. So complicated people are.