I like that post too but it occurs to me that it hinges on the process by which the person chooses how most beneficially to be biased being the person themselves unbiasedly (or less-biasedly) evaluating the alternatives. In which case you then get the tension where that part of that person does actually know the truth and so on.
In particular, it seems to me that it’s still possible to have the choice made for you to tend to have some kinds of false beliefs in a way that predictably correlates with benefitting you (although not necessarily in the form making you happy). Speaking, of course, of natural evolution equipping people with a variety of kinds of social and cognitive biases, as well as predisposition to beliefs around religion, tribal stuff, etc. Far from expert in all the various biases and the research on such, but at least some of them I would expect aren’t just failures of bounded rationality or unwanted misgeneralization, but are/were often socially adaptive (at least locally speaking given bounded rationality, and for the average/typical person, and perhaps more often in much more ancient historical environments that aren’t as evolutionarily out of distribution as the modern world.)
(I like the post about Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) but I wouldn’t say it “conclusively refuted” anything)
I like that post too but it occurs to me that it hinges on the process by which the person chooses how most beneficially to be biased being the person themselves unbiasedly (or less-biasedly) evaluating the alternatives. In which case you then get the tension where that part of that person does actually know the truth and so on.
In particular, it seems to me that it’s still possible to have the choice made for you to tend to have some kinds of false beliefs in a way that predictably correlates with benefitting you (although not necessarily in the form making you happy). Speaking, of course, of natural evolution equipping people with a variety of kinds of social and cognitive biases, as well as predisposition to beliefs around religion, tribal stuff, etc. Far from expert in all the various biases and the research on such, but at least some of them I would expect aren’t just failures of bounded rationality or unwanted misgeneralization, but are/were often socially adaptive (at least locally speaking given bounded rationality, and for the average/typical person, and perhaps more often in much more ancient historical environments that aren’t as evolutionarily out of distribution as the modern world.)