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Bias vs Noise — On the usefulness of bias

• [article] Uncertainty vs Risk — 9 May 2025
  Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.
• [article] Preferring Coherence — 2 May 2025
  Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.
• [article] Sacrificing the Self — 4 Apr 2025
  When we want to identify with a group, we <em>bias</em> ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.
• [article] Stress and Creativity — 28 Mar 2025
  Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.
• [article] Bias vs Noise pt. I: Bias vs Bias — 21 Mar 2025
  The behavioural economists treat bias as an error. But the brain isn’t an economist. It’s more like a statistician, using bias as a trade-off. Bias ignores noise to see something more clearly, though of course, sometimes the noise shouldn’t be ignored.
• [article] Bias is good — 15 Nov 2024
  Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.
• [article] Photoshop for the mind - the halo effect — 3 Jun 2015
  <p>This one phenomenon makes you ignore people’s flaws. It’s the reason that you will pay as much as double for a brand name or ignore the flaws of certain people. It’s called the ‘halo effect’ and although it was discovered as early as 1920, it has just …