One of your best. Loved the use of autonomous vehicles as an example. One big question for me involves understanding when the misapplication of heuristics matters and when it does not, both for an individual and for society as a whole. A bias may well lead us to a second (3rd or 4th) best conclusion, but it does lead to a conclusion. At a practical, for the individual, the question becomes is the time and effort saved through my bias outweighed by the variance between the benefits of the biases outcome and the rationale one. For society, the question is whether these second best outcomes have negative knock on effects for others that we should be trying to avoid. Epistemic humility opens a door to these questions (by encouraging us to understand that our view of the world may be wrong) but does it help us understand where this potential for 'wrongness' matters enough for some form of intervention to occur.
I think that heuristics and biases themselves can be very useful for mitigating some of the negative effects of heuristics and biases. The idea is that we should try to trigger or use different heuristics (to the ones we likely used) as a way of analysing or checking decisions or conclusions. So rather than working hard to avoid biases, we can play different biases off against each other as a more efficient way of checking our thinking. This can be achieved through clever decision-making design, or more easily through different forms of diversity. It doesn't guarantee good decisions, but can help get us closer.
One of your best. Loved the use of autonomous vehicles as an example. One big question for me involves understanding when the misapplication of heuristics matters and when it does not, both for an individual and for society as a whole. A bias may well lead us to a second (3rd or 4th) best conclusion, but it does lead to a conclusion. At a practical, for the individual, the question becomes is the time and effort saved through my bias outweighed by the variance between the benefits of the biases outcome and the rationale one. For society, the question is whether these second best outcomes have negative knock on effects for others that we should be trying to avoid. Epistemic humility opens a door to these questions (by encouraging us to understand that our view of the world may be wrong) but does it help us understand where this potential for 'wrongness' matters enough for some form of intervention to occur.
I think that heuristics and biases themselves can be very useful for mitigating some of the negative effects of heuristics and biases. The idea is that we should try to trigger or use different heuristics (to the ones we likely used) as a way of analysing or checking decisions or conclusions. So rather than working hard to avoid biases, we can play different biases off against each other as a more efficient way of checking our thinking. This can be achieved through clever decision-making design, or more easily through different forms of diversity. It doesn't guarantee good decisions, but can help get us closer.
Agreed, with some caution.