Mind · Reasoning
AnthropomorphicRiskBias
The gap between how humans model and manage risk and how organisms manage it: decision over organisation, prediction over creation, control of shape over change of shape
Definition
Mechanism
Compare the way humans model risk, in intuition and in formal mathematics alike, with the way organisms manage it, and treat the difference as a bias to correct. It has five parts. (1) Humans focus on decision-making over organisation growth. (2) They focus on prediction over creation as the way to control outcomes. (3) When they do attend to organisation, they frame it as tighter ShapeControl: objectives, targets, constraints, plans. (4) As a result they read curves such as exponential growth as shapes to hit, when they are better read as loss of shape. (5) They have under-examined how computer theory relates to the mathematics of prediction and optimisation. Human solutions therefore lean towards MonoModularity and MultiModularity, while Nature leans towards MetaModularity and values InformationGrowth that changes shape. The bias is not found by experiments on subjects, because the experimenters share it; it shows up by contrast with biology.
Invariants
- The bias is defined as a difference from the biological body plan of risk, not from an ideal rational agent
- It is shared by scientists, mathematicians and economists as well as lay decision-makers
- Correcting it adds strategies; it does not throw away decision, prediction or shape control
Risks
Failure modes
Treating the bias as a list of individual psychological errors rather than a structural preference for MonoModularity
Over-correcting by rejecting planning and prediction altogether
Taking biology as a source of loose metaphors rather than of mechanisms to model
Relationships
Builds on
References
Adding new information that has value in its own right, even when exploiting it deforms or abandons the current shape
A body plan that holds many overlapping but non-identical models of the same problem, ready to instantiate whichever fits
A body plan in which one model processes every situation, treating each situation as just more data for the same process
A body plan of standardised, separate parts that can be swapped like for like
Keeping an organisation, model or trajectory close to a desired form or target, with information serving that form
Nothing in this library builds on this pattern yet.