Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Pablo Stafforini's avatar

Let's turn up the rhetoric a notch and see how it feels. What if the arrogant are happier? What if racists and sexists and all the ists who inaccurately feel superior to others are happier because of this feeling?

Bigots appear to be on average happier that just about any other group of people, at least accordingly to this review of recent popular books on happiness. (The review is appallingly bad, but it is bad because it is superficial, not because it is inaccurate.)

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

As far as motivations for Overcoming Bias, one way I look at it is that once informed about the prevalence of human bias, for some of us it is difficult to ignore this information. We then seek to overcome bias not in the hope that it will make us happier, but because our previous state of happiness was spoiled by discovering that it was based on false pretenses.

Robin has suggested occasionally that it might be possible to know about bias and to compensate for it internally, but to continue to act similarly to how people do who are biased, when those behaviors are advantageous. These would be calculated actions rather than spontaneous, but perhaps would produce the same benefits. So if being optimistic makes you a risk-taker, and if risk-taking confers advantages, then even someone who had a more objective perspective could take similar risks even knowing that rewards were a long-shot.

Expand full comment
20 more comments...

No posts