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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"To the extent that our scientific accounts of people's underlying motivations end up painting, as I think they will, an unflattering picture..."

Why unflattering?

If your evaluation of your selfish nature is negative, perhaps the problem is with that evaluation rather than with that nature.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Donald Davidson argued (e.g. in the last four essays in Problems of Rationality) that accounting for self-deception and similar forms of irrationality, such as weakness of the will, requires that the agent be divided into just such a "bureaucracy".

So rather than your model for cognitive bias being an alternative model to self-deception, I'd say that what your model is a re-statement of the Davidsonian model of self-deception.

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