Stefan Pernar wrote:
Now why is that? Cognitive biases could be...
a) ...less fit characteristics of human cognition that did not pose too
big a problem for humanity to make it to the current day (like an
infection prone appendix of the mind - bad but not too bad).
b) ...fitness increasing characteristics of human cognition that proved
beneficial for our ancestors in the course of evolution but that have
lost their value in modern times (like our craving for burgers and fries
that back in the days prevented our ancestors from dying should the next
harvest not go so well but are causing all kind of obesity related
issues in a post caloric scarcity society)
c) ...fitness increasing characteristics of human cognition that are
just as valid today as they were over the course of evolution.
It sounds like you're confusing cognitive bias with inductive bias.
Cognitive biases are nonadaptive side effects of the adaptive
heuristics that give rise to them. Some of these may be ineradicable
even for superintelligences, such as the conjunction fallacy effect of
using an approximation to Solomonoff induction, wherein an effect plus
a compact reason may be deemed more probable than the effect alone
with no compact reason found as yet.
You may find it helpful to read some the following posts, which
disentangle the widely different meanings of "statistical bias",
"inductive bias", and "cognitive bias".
Statistical bias:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/statistical_bia.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/useful_statisti.html
Inductive bias:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/inductive_bias.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/04/priors_as_mathe.html
Cognitive bias:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/whats_a_bias_ag.html
--
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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