Very interesting post! As you have stated implicitly the more popular attempts at outreach as well as raising the sanity waterline on LW have already used affects for the purpose you describe.
However one needs to be very careful. First off it can be hard to measure if the affect is too strong or too weak to offset the bias, actually how exactly can one measure this? I feel like I’m perhaps unfair on this or that because I learned something less flattering about it. Belief in belief works just as well for “identified” cognitive biases as it does for angry old men in the sky.
Secondly every time you use a affect as a tool to help you correct for biases you are begging to be hit on the head by a unknown unknown or even a unknown known. We form subconscious associations very easily, we like our archetypes neat and boexd and like you mention we tend to have a cloud of things all associated with each other that are “bad” and another cloud for “good”.
But I can’t help but wonder if perhaps using boos and yay’s to correct for these things just pushes the bias elsewhere.
Thirdly, creating or consuming art is powerful self modification. This means it can be dangerous. I would perhaps put truly sublime experiences of art and the beautiful right up there with religious experiences and sex when it comes to potential for rewiring. I hope I don’t need to explain how for example fetishes or a sudden case of Bible fever can induce auto-catalytic rewiring.
I would argue that you don’t have to rely solely on your feelings to know whether your impression of a person or group is unfair. An unfair (or, potentially unfair) impression is one uninformed by fact. For you to be informed, there must be information; you know (mostly) whether you have relevant influential information or not. So the time for the emotional hotwiring described in the original post is when you notice that you feel strongly about something but lack information which logically supports your feeling.
“I feel like I’m perhaps unfair on this or that because I learned something less flattering about it.
”
I see now why my comment was down-voted. I should have put more emphasis in that sentence on the word because. That a unfair impression uninformed by fact is something one can’t identify is not what I meant to say. What I’m cautioning is the idea of being very easily able to diagnose the reason behind the unfair impression, based on:
“well I was recently thinking about this and came to x conclusion about it, this must have spilled over”
why couldn’t it be:
“well I was recently thinking about this and I came to x conclusion, and I’ve noticed I already had a unfair emotional response in place from before, maybe I should re-examine my previous conclusion in this light”
or even:
“well I was recently thinking about this and I came to x conclusion, I’m bound to see the world disproportionately in terms of this categorization, the unfair emotional response may well be an artefact to my dislike based on other categorizations”
Whack-A-Mole emotional counter conditioning seems likely to somewhat reduce bias, but I think its less effective and much more just a redistribution of unfair bias than first meets the eye.
Very interesting post! As you have stated implicitly the more popular attempts at outreach as well as raising the sanity waterline on LW have already used affects for the purpose you describe.
However one needs to be very careful. First off it can be hard to measure if the affect is too strong or too weak to offset the bias, actually how exactly can one measure this? I feel like I’m perhaps unfair on this or that because I learned something less flattering about it. Belief in belief works just as well for “identified” cognitive biases as it does for angry old men in the sky.
Secondly every time you use a affect as a tool to help you correct for biases you are begging to be hit on the head by a unknown unknown or even a unknown known. We form subconscious associations very easily, we like our archetypes neat and boexd and like you mention we tend to have a cloud of things all associated with each other that are “bad” and another cloud for “good”.
But I can’t help but wonder if perhaps using boos and yay’s to correct for these things just pushes the bias elsewhere.
Thirdly, creating or consuming art is powerful self modification. This means it can be dangerous. I would perhaps put truly sublime experiences of art and the beautiful right up there with religious experiences and sex when it comes to potential for rewiring. I hope I don’t need to explain how for example fetishes or a sudden case of Bible fever can induce auto-catalytic rewiring.
I would argue that you don’t have to rely solely on your feelings to know whether your impression of a person or group is unfair. An unfair (or, potentially unfair) impression is one uninformed by fact. For you to be informed, there must be information; you know (mostly) whether you have relevant influential information or not. So the time for the emotional hotwiring described in the original post is when you notice that you feel strongly about something but lack information which logically supports your feeling.
“I feel like I’m perhaps unfair on this or that because I learned something less flattering about it. ”
I see now why my comment was down-voted. I should have put more emphasis in that sentence on the word because. That a unfair impression uninformed by fact is something one can’t identify is not what I meant to say. What I’m cautioning is the idea of being very easily able to diagnose the reason behind the unfair impression, based on:
“well I was recently thinking about this and came to x conclusion about it, this must have spilled over”
why couldn’t it be:
“well I was recently thinking about this and I came to x conclusion, and I’ve noticed I already had a unfair emotional response in place from before, maybe I should re-examine my previous conclusion in this light”
or even:
“well I was recently thinking about this and I came to x conclusion, I’m bound to see the world disproportionately in terms of this categorization, the unfair emotional response may well be an artefact to my dislike based on other categorizations”
Whack-A-Mole emotional counter conditioning seems likely to somewhat reduce bias, but I think its less effective and much more just a redistribution of unfair bias than first meets the eye.