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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Asymmetric Sell-Outs

Brian Doherty's history of libertarianism reminded me of a pattern that's struck me before : When wars break out, there...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

On further thought I don't think I was looking at this right. Bias should not be judged with regard to whether it helps us achieve certain goals. It does not make sense to ask whether we have the "right" degree of bias with respect to foreign policy (or at least, that does not advance our goal of "overcoming bias"). In that context my suggestion that we judge warfighting bias in objective or global terms was off the mark.

Rather, bias should be judged with respect to perception of the truth. Bias impairs accuracy, not success. A bias which achieves goal-success at the cost of hurting our perception of a truth is a bias to be overcome, not celebrated. Whether our biases lead to more or less foreign-policy success, or help or hurt net worldwide welfare, they are still biases and are still distortions that we want to learn to overcome.

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