I agree that lots of biases have their roots in social benefits, but I’m unsure whether they’re really here now “because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way” or whether they’re here because it was socially helpful to be biased that way. Humans are adaption executers, not fitness maximizers, so the question is whether we adapted to the ancestral environment by producing a mind that could predict what biases were useful, or by producing a mind with hardcoded biases. The answer is probably some combination of the two.
Yep, that seems like a correct nuance to add. I meant “predict” in a functional sense, rather than in a thought-based one, but that wasn’t at all clear. I appreciate you adding this correction.
I agree that lots of biases have their roots in social benefits, but I’m unsure whether they’re really here now “because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way” or whether they’re here because it was socially helpful to be biased that way. Humans are adaption executers, not fitness maximizers, so the question is whether we adapted to the ancestral environment by producing a mind that could predict what biases were useful, or by producing a mind with hardcoded biases. The answer is probably some combination of the two.
Yep, that seems like a correct nuance to add. I meant “predict” in a functional sense, rather than in a thought-based one, but that wasn’t at all clear. I appreciate you adding this correction.