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Cognitive Biases & In-Group Convergences with Joscha Bach

True & false vs right & wrong – People converge their views to set of rights and wrongs relative to in-group biases in their peer group.
As a survival mechanism, convergence in groups is sometimes more healthy than being right – so one should optimize for convergence sometimes even at the cost of getting stuff wrong – so humans probably have an evolutionary propensity to favor convergence over truth.
However by optimizing for convergence may result in the group mind being more stupid than the smartest people in the group.

 

 
Joscha highlights the controversy of Yonatan Zunger being fired for sending out an email about biological differences between men and women effecting abilities as engineers – where Zunger’s arguments may be correct – now regardless of what the facts are about how biological differences effect differences in ability between men & women, google fired him because they thought supporting these arguments would make for a worse social environment.

This sort of thing leads to an interesting difference in discourse, where:
* ‘nerds’ tend to focus on ‘content‘, on imparting ideas and facts where everyone can judge these autonomously and form their own opinions – in view that in order to craft the best solutions we need to have the best facts
* most people the purpose of communication is ‘coordination‘ between individuals and groups (society, nations etc) – where the value on a ‘fact’ is it’s effect on the coordination between people

So is Google’s response to the memo controversy about getting the facts right, or about how Google at this point should be organised?

What’s also really interesting is that different types of people read this ‘memo’ very differently – making it very difficult to form agreement about the content of this memo – how can one agree on whats valuable about communication – whether it’s more about imparting ideas and facts or whether it’s more about coordination?

More recently there has been a lot of talk about #FakeNews – where it’s very difficult to get people to agree to things that are not in their own interests – and including, as Joshca points out, the idea that truth matters.

Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Discussion points:
– In-group convergence: thinking in true & false vs right & wrong
– The group mind may be more stupid than the smartest individuals in the group

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