No, I’m not saying they thrive by bias, exactly, or at least not the simple kind of bias. They thrive by having a hierarchy and being official. They thrive because they’ve made a commitment.
Consider marriage. In an ideal world, two people would stay monogamous purely because they loved each other. In reality, that monogamy is going to be tested, and there’s going to be some point at which they don’t want to keep it. When they’re rational, they know the best thing for their future and their children is to stay together, but they realize that they might be too short-sighted to do so later. So they use the institution of marriage to make it socially, financially, and theologically impossible for them to split up later. It’s the present self binding potentially irrational future selves. Not only is it not a bias, but if it’s done right it’s an antidote to bias.
There’s that one website, whatsitsname, where you send them money and a resolution. Maybe it’s “I will go to the gym every day for a month”, and you send them $100. At the end of the month, if you went to the gym every day, they send your money back; if you didn’t, they keep it. I wouldn’t say you were biased into going to the gym, I’d say you discovered a clever technique to make you do it.
Organizations, at least the ones you join voluntarily, are another clever technique for causing that kind of commitment. And yeah, a lot of the techniques they use to do it, like the initiation ceremonies, are biases. But I don’t consider biases that smart people invoke voluntarily to control their akrasia to always be great evils.
I think using bias to fight bias is an extremely risky technique, since it must surely call for self-deception on some level. I’m not a fan of marriage or monogamy either so those examples don’t ring bells for me.
Yvain, what’s the website? I’m not skilled enough to find it from those clues. Asking because I outlined the exact same idea in a blog post in Russian about a year ago, thinking it was original, and now am curious to see the implementation.
No, I’m not saying they thrive by bias, exactly, or at least not the simple kind of bias. They thrive by having a hierarchy and being official. They thrive because they’ve made a commitment.
Consider marriage. In an ideal world, two people would stay monogamous purely because they loved each other. In reality, that monogamy is going to be tested, and there’s going to be some point at which they don’t want to keep it. When they’re rational, they know the best thing for their future and their children is to stay together, but they realize that they might be too short-sighted to do so later. So they use the institution of marriage to make it socially, financially, and theologically impossible for them to split up later. It’s the present self binding potentially irrational future selves. Not only is it not a bias, but if it’s done right it’s an antidote to bias.
There’s that one website, whatsitsname, where you send them money and a resolution. Maybe it’s “I will go to the gym every day for a month”, and you send them $100. At the end of the month, if you went to the gym every day, they send your money back; if you didn’t, they keep it. I wouldn’t say you were biased into going to the gym, I’d say you discovered a clever technique to make you do it.
Organizations, at least the ones you join voluntarily, are another clever technique for causing that kind of commitment. And yeah, a lot of the techniques they use to do it, like the initiation ceremonies, are biases. But I don’t consider biases that smart people invoke voluntarily to control their akrasia to always be great evils.
I think using bias to fight bias is an extremely risky technique, since it must surely call for self-deception on some level. I’m not a fan of marriage or monogamy either so those examples don’t ring bells for me.
Yvain, what’s the website? I’m not skilled enough to find it from those clues. Asking because I outlined the exact same idea in a blog post in Russian about a year ago, thinking it was original, and now am curious to see the implementation.
Hmm...got it bookmarked somewhere...ah! http://www.stickk.com/