I was listening to a podcast conversation about overcoming biases to make better decisions.
We all love the idea of unbiased information processing, evaluating, and decision making. We don’t want to be blinded by our prior experiences, tastes, and assumptions and miss something valuable or correct because of it. It is very valuable to ruthlessly examine your biases and make sure you aren’t misreading the world and failing to achieve your goals because of it.
But bias is not a bad thing. Nor is it good. It’s a neutral reality and an inescapable part of the way our minds work. It can be bad, it can be good, and it can be neither. Bias is nothing more than a way of seeing, or an inclination or opinion about causality. It’s not possible to have no bias, as any thought or action would cease if you were merely an open sponge taking in stimuli without forming any judgement about it. A fully unbiased brain is one with no synaptic connections. Yes, those neural pathways become hard to escape and that can prevent better thought, but having no neural pathways precludes all thought.
Your bias is what makes you unique. Anything you excel at, you do because you have particular biases others do not, and these enable you to more effectively navigate the field. Breakthroughs don’t come from unbiased people, but from people with a unique, counter-bias that doesn’t jive with the status quo.
The most successful people I know are also the most biased. Not in weird socially conditioned ways. But in profound and productive ways. They have biases about what works in their field, and they can spot opportunity and make decisions faster than those who try endlessly to evaluate every contingency and arrive at an unbiased opinion.
Of course the very real danger is that past success cements biases that are not useful for present or future conditions. This is the norm. It’s very hard to continue to question the very inclinations and mental shortcuts that served you well. But that’s what growth is.
So the trick is not to try to get rid of bias. The trick is to become aware of its existence and just how pervasive and powerful it is. The trick is to question your bias, to manually override it at times, to take charge of it and reprogram it. The trick is to use it as a tool to serve your goals, rather than be its unwitting servant.