# Your biases are awesome

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2015/08/28/your-biases-are-awesome/
- Published: 2015-08-28T12:31:10+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

You should use them more

Everybody hates poor biases. They have such a bad name for no reason at all. The
Cartesian bully keeps pushing biases around every time they meet on the hallways
of your mind. This has to stop.

Biases are good. They help you be fast. They will help you a lot in weird, unknown
geography, with scarce resources trying to survive. A lot.

Databases have internal mini programs that help manage data in the fastest possible
way. A behind the scenes activity that just works, as the world keeps minding its
business. These mini programs are “stored procedures”. Stored procedures draw hate
too, just like biases. They get called evil. They get ignored every time, even though
countless hours have gone into their design.

Biases are like the stored procedures of the brain.

And like stored procedures they have the same issues. Ancient programmers wrote 
them. They have been there forever and no one knows exactly how they work.

Like stored procedures they are ran by triggers.

This is what you should be aware of. Not the actual biases, not how they work, it
is impossible. As shown by many studies, people informed about their bias will continue
to exhibit it. But what you can pay attention to is when does the bias trigger. 
What happened _before _the bias kicked in.

Say, you hear about a divorce. You say: “I knew it all along!”. You hear Pluto is
a dwarf planet do you still say “I knew it all along!”? Nope, you don’t. It is things
connected to you that trigger hindsight.

This applies to almost all biases. They work for one thing: optimize the way you
use and store your memory. Biases use your brain data, to respond to changes and
updates in the outer world. All biases are about you and the environment and all
the triggers function with this approach.

So the takeaway here is that for a less biased life just do one thing: consider 
you do not know anything at all. When you ignore access to your memory as a means
to explain what happens, the triggers don’t fire and your biases don’t execute. 
Most of out of the box thinking appears from such an approach.

You can use biases too — if you realize that you can only rely on them on _narrow
_situations. They exist to handle specific, small use cases. Just like stored procedures.