Is it Possible to Hedge on Our Biases?

But this led to the belief that all biases tend to be negative, that they don’t have much to contribute to our societies other than to create prejudice, ignorance or even hate. But let us remember that these complex systems are the ones responsible for our self-preservation and survival. They helped us cut through the noise and focus in a volatile world, where change has been the only constant.

So, this article is intended to remove some of the biases we have of the biases that rule our worldview. Paradoxical, right? I want to understand how is it that our decision-making systems evolved, where did they start and why do we need them— if we can re-engineer the way we see them— to be perceptive in an ever-changing world.

Although it seems like a negative trait to have, this bias didn’t always work to serve our own narratives. Moreover, it didn’t appear our of nowhere, nor was invented by one particular person. It is important to remember that human reasoning is ruled by mechanisms that evolved to solve certain situations of high pressure. We also have to keep in mind that these models support our brain to act quickly (Good enough is better than dead).

One could hypothesize that this bias wants to keep its duty of being a tool for efficiency and survival, as we keep trending towards a less violent world. This bias has adapted itself to our modern “dangers”. Some of these new “risks” are: debates, watching news networks, reading new information, etc… these are interpreted as likely causes of injury by our brain considering that nowadays we are hardly confronted physically.

Imagine you’re NASA and want to test whether water is necessary for life. In [a] formal logical [way] your statement is ‘If there is life on a planet, then there is water on the planet’. To test this while avoiding confirmation bias, you would have to investigate all [the] planets with life and all [the] planets without water. Planets with water don’t have to be investigated, [be]cause you don’t say that water needs to have life. Do you think it’s a good way to spend NASA’s resources, sending out ships to all planets without water? I would argue it makes more sense to start with planet[s] with water (The example is taken [from] “What matters?” of Flach and Voorhorst).

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