Bias

Bias is an obstacle to our goal of obtaining truth. It’s an obstacle that stems from this goal of truth that we talk about. Obstacles are other than biases as well.

If we start right out by asking “What is bias?”, it comes at the question in the wrong order. As the proverb goes, “There are forty kinds of lunacy but only one kind of common sense.”

“What is bias? . To start with seems like such an open ended question I guess, with a wide possibility of answers. The truth is a narrow space to hit, where as the untruth is fucking everything else. Like looking at every religion in the world in the hope of finding the truth. There are so many religions, and least to say, none of them could actually help us in our finding the truth.

We don’t want to start with a moral duty to “reduce bias”, because it is Bad, evil and just not done.

This type of thinking is not what we wan’t to go on with. Here we just do something without knowing why we are doing something. We don’t wan’t to do things just because it is infused in us culturally.

Was ist das bias?

s Rather, we would like to discover truth for [whatever reason][truth]. While doing so we meet with obstacles. Some of the type of obstacles we might face in discovering the truth could be ones where there is not enough computing power, ones where there is not the right information or information is not cheap, etc. The obstacle-truth space, seems to have a cluster of large group of obstacles with similar characteristics. This is for now labeled as ‘biases’.

Apparently (according to Eliezer), we can only get as close to giving a few extensional examples, whilst attempting to give an explanation of the cluster that is the bias.

If you are a scientist just beginning to investigate fire, it might be a lot wiser to point to a campfire and say “Fire is that orangey-bright hot stuff over there,” rather than saying “I define fire as an alchemical transmutation of substances which releases phlogiston.”

The idea being the most concrete definition might not really be the one that takes us forward. We should not ignore the simple definition/ lack of one in this case, regarding ‘bias’. Surely the lack of the definition has nothing to do with the consequences that we will be plagued with.