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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

After living a life of struggle I figured out that life is not necessarily good and evil but instead positive and negative.

The second idea allows for more variation then simply saying something/someone is good/bad.

Just like we all know that light has many different wavelengths.

I do not feel positive vibes so I am not going to claim I know a whole lot about those even though I feel like being a hypocrite about it and saying I do.

I do however believe that lying has many MANY different vibrations which is why people respond differently depending on how deep you go and of course the other persons experience with liers.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

But then how come we are so good at recognizing faces, remembering social and family relationships, and speculating about John's wife's best friend's intentions towards his brother?

If I recall correctly, it has been demonstrated that such higher-order relationship manipulations are more promptly and much better understood when they are cast in terms allowing us to apply our theory of mind, rather than in terms involving only inanimate objects and suchlike.

Of course, this doesn't imply that social thought is necessarily Machiavellian, as for trying to evade rules, only that for some reason it has been extremely important in our evolutionary past.

Anybody has some hard data indicating whether we are better at cynical self-serving social thought, or at other more community-serving sorts? (Bar sociopaths, say, who are firmly in the first camp)

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