Automatized Knowledge Can Resist Bias
Habits, automatized knowledge and the subconscious can be a source of bias but can also resist bias.
The primary purpose of practicing ideas and skills is to enable your subconscious to do them. Subconscious energy and attention are more plentiful and cheap than conscious energy and attention. This is called automatization (including by Ayn Rand) because, from the perspective of your conscious mind, what your subconscious does is largely automatic. Practice can teach mental tasks to your subconscious mind and free up your conscious mind for more advanced tasks.
A secondary purpose of practice is that making something habitual, or being able to do it on autopilot, makes it more resistant to bias or emotions. Even when you’re really upset, you can still walk or even drive (if you’ve been driving for years). You’ll make more mistakes but your chance of tripping or getting in a car accident is still fairly low. Your skill has significant resistance to your emotions.
Habits are known in general for having resistance to your current mood and being hard to consciously, intentionally change. Habits can also be hard to unintentionally or subconsciously change – they can be stable despite your emotions and biases.
Well-practiced knowledge, which your subconscious gets right, is harder to lie to yourself about or otherwise be biased about. For example, you can identify animals from pictures very easily. You know what a cat, dog, cow, bird or pig looks like. That’s automatic and well practiced. It's possible to create pictures where it’s hard to tell, but for most drawings or photos you can easily tell which animal it is. And you can still do that if you’re upset. And you can still do that if you’re super biased. If you really want it to be a cute cat, but it’s a bird, you’ll recognize that it’s a bird. It’s hard to lie to yourself that a cow is a dog or vice versa.
You’d strongly prefer that dangerous bear, which you see 20 feet away, be a snail instead. But you still won’t mistake it for a snail.
People can be good at believing what they want to believe or are incentivized to believe, but it doesn't work for everything. Believing your chair is a flamingo, or your bed is a microwave, doesn’t work. Your subconscious instantly knows the truth.
I don’t think the main issue is large, obvious differences. People make huge mistakes at other times. I think the primary issue is what people are good at, and learned and practiced (especially in childhood), and have a lot of subconscious skill at.
The more subconsciously automatic some of your philosophy analysis skills are, the harder it will be to reach false conclusions even when you have a bias, emotion or static meme which is causing trouble.
Biases, emotions and static memes, in some particular ways, have better control or influence over your conscious mind than over your subconscious mind. But there are other ways they have better control or influence over your subconscious. What are they good at influencing and why?
Making up complex or bizarre rationalizations is something that typically involves conscious thought. Clever people often do it more than dumber people even though it's a bad thing. They can use their cleverness and creativity to invent deceptions (often for themselves, sometimes only for others).
People can be lazy. They often avoid effort which primarily means avoiding conscious effort. They have less control over what effort their subconscious does. Subconscious effort often doesn’t feel like effort. It’s conscious effort that people generally recognize as effort.
People talk about subconscious biases. How do those work? They may automate the bias. They may make a habit of the bias. They can build bias into the automatization in the first place when they're practicing and learning. So then they’re automatically biased regardless of their current conscious mood (even a serious, honest, scientific, anti-bias mood may not be effective).
What about emotions? People build emotional reactivity into their automatizations. They often automatically have emotional reactions even if they don’t consciously want to.
What about static memes? They don’t really need their own separate analysis. Some automatized biases are static memes. Some automatized emotional reactions are static memes. People learn a lot of these things from other people and culture. Static memes aren’t their own special, unique form of bias or emotion. They are a descriptor of the replication strategy of ideas (suppressing criticism instead of being good). The replicating ideas can be subconsciously automatized, include biases, include emotional triggers, and more.
I thought it's interesting that habits, automatized knowledge and the subconscious can be a source of bias but can also resist bias. We may automatize biases and find them hard to change later. But we may also automatize good thinking and find it hard to be biased later. You learned 2+2=4 in childhood and now it's hard to believe something else and get it wrong.
Should the goal be to only practice true ideas and avoid getting any false subconscious knowledge or bad habits? No. You should do critical thinking before you practice something. You should try to learn high quality things not mistakes. But you will inevitably learn some mistakes. That's OK. We can revisit ideas and relearn them differently later. Our habits, automatizations, intuitions and subconscious can be changed. Sometimes learning a better idea is enough. Often, intentional practice is needed to change a habit.
Many habits are pretty easy to change. When I play a video game, if I change what keyboard keys do what, I can often adjust fairly quickly and relearn what keys to press. After some practice, I get used to the new keyboard layout. If you find a habit a lot harder to change than that, you may not have a full understanding of what the old knowledge is, what the new knowledge you want to replace it with is, and why the new knowledge is better. You also may have an internal disagreement about what's better. It's much easier to change a habit when you're thoroughly convinced the change is strictly better, not a tradeoff with pros and cons.
Also, generally speaking, if you practice good ideas and master them, and get them automatized in your subconscious, then that helps you get things right even when tired, sloppy, distracted, upset or biased.
For more about how to approach your subconscious rationally, see: