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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"Now consider a being who has evolved to include a paradigm case of biasing -- say that .001% of the time, it chooses its beliefs at random rather than following a rational process."

That's a paradigm case of variance, not a paradigm case of bias. (Of course, as a follower of E. T. Jaynes, I probably shouldn't believe in the bias-variance decomposition because it isn't Bayesian enough.)

"In a society with a stable but incomplete truth-finding procedure, it has some non-zero probability of hitting on a belief that happens to be true but is not in the "best beliefs" set because it is not reachable by current procedures."

Not all non-zero probabilities are worth pursuing. Lottery tickets, and monkeys typing Shakespeare, both come to mind. Truth is a much smaller target to hit than error - of all possible ways to obtain it, a random number generator has got to rank among the least effective.

"If that belief happens to be conducive to survival (either because it leads to physical or superior social success), evolution might select for it wholly apart from society's incomplete truth-finding process."

All you've done is describe an additional truth-finding process, and not, it seems to me, a very good one: "Adopt beliefs produced by random number generators, and let natural selection take its course." The problems being, (1), a random number generator is pretty unlikely to hit anything but gibberish; (2), not everything that correlates to the number of surviving offspring is interpretable as a belief, and those interpretable as beliefs aren't necessarily true; (3) random beliefs aren't necessarily heritable with digital fidelity; (4), even if the underlying trick worked, you could do much better by tracking census statistics on what people believe and how many children they have, and examining the statistical conclusions, rather than waiting thousands of generations for natural selection to take its course.

I agree it's worth noticing when an odd-seeming belief seems to correlate to, say, the ability to manipulate physical reality. But it seems to me that it's much better to try to bring this criterion into the deliberate judgment process, than to embrace noise (much less bias) in our cognitive systems.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

You think? Maybe so... I'd intended this as nothing more than a thin sketch of some preliminary and loosely related thoughts, but if this isn't productive, I'll break it up over the next week or so and elaborate each point a little further.

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