
Why We’re Biased About Being Biased - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-youre-biased-about-being-biased
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golemotron
> The “moral credential effect” describes this compensation in the context of
> moral reasoning. When study subjects were given an opportunity to disagree
> with sexist statements, for example, they were then more likely to favor
> giving a stereotypically male job to a man instead of a woman (compared to
> people who weren’t exposed to the statements). Likewise, people who believed
> they were morally good were more likely to cheat on a math test.

That's interesting. It means that if we want social justice, the last thing we
should do is make people feel that they need to take public stands for it.

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jkraker
Social media gives a lot of people the platform to do this and some use it
quite heavily. It would be interesting to see the correlation between
something like "ferocity" on Facebook and real life actions.

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golemotron
I don't know if there are any studies about this but I don't see anything that
would make it different. Social media gives us 24/7 opportunity to feel good
being on the "right" side of an issue.

I wonder whether there's an inverse correlation between social media use and
direct action on civic and social causes: writing a Congress person,
volunteering at a homeless shelter, or giving to charities.

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surement
Wikipedia has a pretty fascinating list of cognitive biases, it's fun to go
through it and mark each that applies until you start looking for the bias
about thinking you have all of them:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

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marcosdumay
Of course you have all of them. Those are common patterns in human thinking,
and I guess you are human (correct me if I'm wrong).

You just don't have all of them at the same time, and have more bias in some
situations than in others.

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runeks
All life forms are biased towards their own survival. That's why they're alive
in the first place.

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daveguy
This is why AI practitioners will never make artificial human intelligence. It
will be found to be way too bug ridden before the hard work (expense wrt
power, computation, bandwidth) of getting it trained to a human level is
completed.

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daveguy
To clarify, the emphasis there is on _human_. I don't doubt 50+ years from now
we will have general purpose artificial intelligences as sharp as humans. They
just won't be very human like. Typical heuristic errors like confirmation bias
will be quantified and that's about as inhuman as it gets.

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solipsism
You've failed to account for the inevitability that general AI itself will be
extremely interested in modeling human cognition.

