Bias

Today we played Bias Jeopardy at a class at the unemployment office.

As a veteran of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, as well as someone who interned at Decision Research in the 1980s and has kept up with the field, I did well at it. Plus, poker tends to illuminate a good number of them.

All the categories were types of biases and all the answers were specific biases chosen from a list we had names and definitions for in advance. All in all, we had a good time becoming more familiar with them.

I do recommend studying biases. It's fun, and helps make better decisions. I suspect a human cannot become entirely bias-free – there are too many, and we have inherited a legacy of fast, imperfect decision-making. Yet each one known gains a little more freedom and accuracy. And those benefits add up.