I’m not sure I agree with this part so much. Given a biased heuristic, reversing stupidity would mean reversing the heuristic. (For example, reversing the availability heuristic would mean judging that a phenomenon is more frequent when examples of it come to mind less easily.) Applying a fudge factor isn’t reversing stupidity, because the biases themselves are systematically wrong.
So, given a biased heuristic, I can imagine two ways of dealing with it: you can use other heuristics instead, or you can attempt to correct the bias. I think both ways can be useful in certain circumstances. In particular, correcting the bias should be a useful method as long as two things are true: you understand the bias well enough to correct it successfully; and, once you’ve corrected the bias, you end up with a useful heuristic.
“I don’t like Bob, so things he says are probably wrong” is simply an example of a heuristic that, once de-biased, no longer says anything at all, and is thus useless.
I think we actually mostly agree. I’ll see if I can make my points clearer.
The first was that if you notice that what you’re actually doing is a lot like “Bob bad, so he wrong”, then the better solution is to cut that part of your thinking out and separate it from your decision making, not to try to keep it there but add a fudge factor so that the total algorithm has less of this bias.
The way you carved it, I would suggest “use ‘other’ heuristics” or correct the bias through excision not through addition of a cancelling bias. When I said “other heuristics” I would count it as a different heuristic if you took the same heuristic and excised the bias from it.
The second was that even if you could perfectly cancel it, you haven’t added any substance. You don’t want to congratulate yourself on canceling a bias and then fail to notice that you just hold maxent beliefs.
I think we actually mostly agree. I’ll see if I can make my points clearer.
The first was that if you notice that what you’re actually doing is a lot like “Bob bad, so he wrong”, then the better solution is to cut that part of your thinking out and separate it from your decision making, not to try to keep it there but add a fudge factor so that the total algorithm has less of this bias.
The way you carved it, I would suggest “use ‘other’ heuristics” or correct the bias through excision not through addition of a cancelling bias. When I said “other heuristics” I would count it as a different heuristic if you took the same heuristic and excised the bias from it.
The second was that even if you could perfectly cancel it, you haven’t added any substance. You don’t want to congratulate yourself on canceling a bias and then fail to notice that you just hold maxent beliefs.