Bias is Good

Everyone’s been told that bias is the enemy of good thinking. Over 200 cognitive biases catalogued on Wikipedia, and the message is clear: your brain is broken, and if you could just think more rationally, you’d make better decisions. But when researchers actually tested whether knowledge of biases helped predict behaviour, the experts did worse than random laypeople. Maybe the problem isn’t bias. Maybe the problem is what we think bias is. Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good-lecture And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/bias-is-good. Stuff I mentioned: The Betterment article that inspired this Confirmation bias is all there is—fundamental beliefs and belief-consistent processing Bias vs Bias—heuristics vs biases, and why the distinction matters Stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law—bias vs noise in the stress response Stress is Good (Lecture 1)—the stress lecture The Amygdala is Not the Fear Centre (Lecture 2)—the amygdala lecture Everything is Ideology—why biases are adaptive Pop Neuroscience is Just a Fancy Way of Saying “Calm Down” Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow List of cognitive biases (Wikipedia)—the 200+ biases Rational-actor model (Wikipedia) Milkman et al. (2021): Megastudy on behavioural nudges for vaccination Oeberst & Imhoff (2023): Toward Parsimony in Bias Research—the fundamental beliefs paper Robert Axelrod’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments Bias–variance tradeoff (Wikipedia) How some ‘psychics’ use psychology to screw you How always being right makes you dumber Eerie coincidences aren’t that eerie