Because there are rules of logic, reasoning, and evidence that are independent of your biases. You have to learn them and become skilled at applying them to sources of information (something that everyone should be learning in school).
So which particular logical heuristics would you apply to determining if a nation was in fact in recession, and what the causes of that recession were?
The simple model works when you're dealing with proving that your cat is on fire, it's much harder when the topic gets complicated.
From the information and experiences you have recieved, likely you would vote for the candidate who resonated most with your interpretation of the "truth".
Then as a society we apply the wisdom of the crowd.
Right, so is your point that everyone experiences bias?
I was not disputing we all have an internal bias built up by our experiences. The crux of that point is you try to minimise your own bias and try to further reduce that bias by including the bias of the remainder of society.
I don't think this is a terrible way to select a political candidate.
As an aside I don't understand how a political discussion could exist without bias. What is your model of politics that would allow it to exist without bias?
I think what you're diligently sussing out here is the HN crowd believes they are perfect rational and logical decision makers but are actually, just as everyone else, driven by their biases.
I don’t think that’s right. We all make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but there are well-tested ways of improving the quality of those judgements. You seem to be arguing that because we can’t make perfect judgements we are therefore condemned to always make arbitrary judgements based on bias, a sophomoric skepticism that isn’t supported by real-world experiences.
> You seem to be arguing that because we can’t make perfect judgements we are therefore condemned to always make arbitrary judgements based on bias
Not arbitrary, I'm not arguing that. I am arguing that education and intelligence isn't enough to combat biases. A lot of people commenting here are touting education and intelligence as some sort of bias reducing (or eliminating) tool, which it can be, but as I've said elsewhere I know plenty of educated intelligent people who are slaves to their biases. Some of these people gained their biases through education, and they discount their biases because they believe they are too intelligent to have biases.
What I think many people are missing here is that biases aren't something you educate away, they're something education helps you recognize and compensate for.
Also I note your use of the phrase"perfect judgments" here. Perfect how? For whom? Under what criteria? There's no such thing as a "perfect judgment" without framing it in a context (i.e. using a bias). One person's perfect, logically sound, rational judgment might not be so for another person.
My concern is that, because someone BELIEVES they are using logic, education, and intelligence to come to a conclusion they may be just as wrong. "logic, education, and intelligence" is a way of justifying a belief, it's not a way of proving the assumption to be true. It's not a matter of being imperfect in judgement, it's a matter of being willing to accept that we are imperfect, and that, even if you think you're using the perfect method for rationalizing the world, it may not actually be.
