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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Doug S.,

my knee-jerk reaction was also "when the enemy is fictional", but I wondered if this might not be sufficient: Preaching even non-existent enemies as being immoral may cause intolerance towards unrelated attributes which were given to this fictional enemy (perhaps to make the lies more convincing).

E.g. "Blubworbs are evil. They steal, murder, rape and have blue eyes." -> "Let's hate people with blue eyes."

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conchis point A: "Do you (Robin) have any such behaviors in mind as potential applications?"

This community identifies its enemy as using inappropriate mental shortcuts: the irrational, the comforting fiction, the recursive buck. "They," the soto, are trying to cognitively cheat. To avoid being like Them, "We," the uchi, must be constantly aware of our biases and tendency to use cognitive cheats, with an ironic sense that this cognitive cheating does not really help one win.

Or you could see this as failing: because cognitive cheating is something They do, We must be the ones who are successfully thinking past our biases.

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