Totally love the above video @fatgator passed along to me ha.
At some point in life one of the questions you have to answer for yourself is this:
To what degree is cognitive bias a fundamentally negative part of the human condition?
For example, the charge behind lesswrong.org is that bias is fundamentally wrong in the purest sense of the word; one's goal should be to become less biased, thus optimizing one's life.
There's another angle that wonders what it means for the universe to even have something like "wrong in the most pure sense of the word." This has to do with the question: what does it even mean to optimize one's life?
The quintessential example is the machine that knows so much about you that it can perfectly 'optimize' your life (and I mean optimize in the purest sense of the word - that is to say that it is unbiased, perfectly calculating, and error-free): when it tells you in a morning email exactly all the steps to follow in order to have an 'optimized' life, do you follow it to the letter?
I've only been asking this question for a couple months but I have yet to run into someone who calls this 'optimal.'
In other words, even optimization strategies have optimization strategies.
Just a thought, but it's what I think about when I wonder about the idea of 'better living through less bias.'
