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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Nick - you briefly mention organizational communications. I think the topic of organizational bias is fascinating, but very different from individual bias, and requires its own taxonomy. The most common type of organizational bias I see is basically failed mechanism design: when the natural outcome of a system is different from the intended one because the mapping from mechanism to outcome is really hard to make. Or sometimes, when the mechanism wasn't even designed consciously, but just evolved, and doesn't necessarily serve organizational goals. Well, that and misrepresentation, of course :).

Anyway, I definitely agree on the need for a taxonomy.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I teach a course in Critical Thinking and am working on a text of my own, so this is something that has taken up a lot of my attention for a while. I think Bostrom is dead on about the need. I've actually worked on a taxonomy but interestingly, whereas Bostrom's appears to be divided as to the cause, I've been thinking to type them functionally--that is, what the biases typically do in reasoning and where they typically occur. I think the causal story is very interesting, and one that I think deserves a great deal of thought as well, but inasmuch as rationality is a normative concern, the causal sources of biases is a different part of the story--sort of 'how things can go wrong'. Psychologists, as Bostrom and everyone here well knows, have whole libraries devoted to descrying the various causal mechanisms, most of which have been brought up here. I agree that these are done in a much too wholesale and unorganized fashion. One thing that I've been thinking about is the place of what are commonly called fallacies (mostly of the informal sort, but also lots of the common formal ones--Wason stuff, etc.) within the taxonomy of biases. I think fallacies are best viewed as a type of bias, and not the other way around. I'd be interested to hear others' comments on that.

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