<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Thu., 19 Jul. 2018, 1:01 am William Flynn Wallace, <<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com">foozler83@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:19.2px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial">Job done (I am right) :-) ..... or am I? So far the evidence is consistent with my hypothesis. It predicts exactly what your post is about: it predicts humans screwing up badly as a primary cognitive necessity to deal with the unknown.</div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:19.2px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:19.2px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial">cheers</div><span class="m_-4532334200916345236gmail-HOEnZb" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:19.2px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-decoration-style:initial;text-decoration-color:initial"><font color="#888888"><div>colin</div></font></span>I can't see some of these biases as leading to anything but further bias, and maybe worse at that. Use the self-serving bias along with the fundamental attritutional error too much and you never understand the other people in the world.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">And it is unclear to me just how one gets out of the original biased decision/action. Some will stop at the first approximation - I call this 'good enough for who it's for' - and will be consistently wrong. Add the self-serving bias to this and you get a person who cannot admit he is wrong - who maybe knows it but has no way to get his ox out of his ditch.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">If one uses unbiased methods one can be wrong many times before one is right, but, like the scientists, he doggedly keeps with his methods and finally gets to the truth of things.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">In short, I don't see making biased decisions as a necessary first step.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">bill w</div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Ok. Think of it as a general requirement for cognitive agents where individual or species-fatal unknowns can happen. If the agent is rigidly defined, choices are hard coded and never change. The behaviours may be complex. Yet there can be no bias (in the sense meant here) except that the agent may respond erroneously to deep novelty.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Now imagine an agent that can adapt to novelty. Initially it is 'wrong' in some sense. Later it becomes 'right' in the sense of predictive.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I am not claiming being wrong as a necessary first step. I am claiming that being wrong is a natural result of an encounter with the unknown. By definition.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The problem happens when the agent fails to adapt to or even acknowledge evidence shedding light on the rectitude of choices it makes.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If an agent is equipped to encounter and prevail over arbitrarily deep novelty, then it it automatically inherits a potential for state-trajectories into the BS -weeds, and in the absence of contrary evidence, may never escape. For example, being in a Facebook bubble or a religious sect or conspiracy-theory etc etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">This predisposition for being wrong first, and correcting, means novelty is less a threat to survival. A happy side effect is an ability to do science (where novelty is the food) and an ability to problem-solve, because 'problem' is another word for a kind of novelty.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">That's the sense I mean.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you 'gift' an agent absolute truth and all possible truths, then somewhere at the novelty boundary, your gift ends and your agent is clueless and powerless.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Cheers</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Colin</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 7:18 PM, Colin Hales <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:col.hales@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">col.hales@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">I wrote about this in my book.<div><br></div><div>When you don't know something then to understand it you have to make an explanatory hypothesis which, at the moment of its creation, is formally 'wrong' in the sense that until evidence confirms it, it's not predictive yet. Over time your hypothesis acquires a body of evidence and you get to be 'right' in the sense of 'predictive'. That is, in order for a human to make sense of the world, you have to be able to be 'wrong'. Making wrong hypotheses is a double edged sword. </div><div><br></div><div>1) You get to be right post-hoc.</div><div>but </div><div>2) On the down side, if you're an idiot that has a broken sense of what evidence is (...in the 1000 cognitive biases in Wikipedia and in the attached 'codex') then you get stuck with your own, pardon me, bullshit. Like religion, for example.</div><div><br></div><div>In the brutal evolutionary 'get it right or die' process, evolution has favoured a creature like us that can be very wrong and use that exact ability to then get at the true nature of things. Later you become 'right'. I used this to great effect in a formal scientific account of scientific behaviour.</div><div><br></div><div>Job done (I am right) :-) ..... or am I? So far the evidence is consistent with my hypothesis. It predicts exactly what your post is about: it predicts humans screwing up badly as a primary cognitive necessity to deal with the unknown.</div><div><br></div><div>cheers</div><span class="m_-4532334200916345236HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div>colin</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></font></span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="m_-4532334200916345236h5">On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 5:51 AM, Spike Jones <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">spike@rainier66.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div class="m_-4532334200916345236h5"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="m_-4532334200916345236m_-2809410010575205072m_1556151620777580263WordSection1"><span><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org</a>> <b>On Behalf Of </b>William Flynn Wallace<br><br><b><u></u><u></u></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></span><div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background:white">>…<span style="color:#222222">Evolution did a great job but it has a long way to go. I hope it gets the chance. 'Survival of the fittest' does not seem to describe the current state of world affairs in the evolutionary sense.</span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><span><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;color:black">Are we, in fact, not losing the unfit?</span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> <span style="color:black">bill w</span><u></u><u></u></span></p></div></span><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">This observation about survival of the fittest should have been stated survival of the best adapted. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">If we are discussing humans, fitness in the traditional sense is nearly irrelevant. The unfit prosper in the right environment, such as our technically advanced world. People who are dependent on modern medical technology for instance are likely to reside near a hospital, which implies a big city, where reproductive opportunities are relatively plentiful. In that sense, the unfit are better adapted to our world than the fittest.<span class="m_-4532334200916345236m_-2809410010575205072HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><u></u><u></u></font></span></span></p><span class="m_-4532334200916345236m_-2809410010575205072HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">spike<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> <u></u><u></u></span></p></font></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><span>_______________________________________________<br>
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