The study of cognitive bias takes places in the space between the physical sciences and the human experience. The former isle represents the observational and explanatory powers of a uniquely successful earthly species. The latter represents the forces that both propelled this wily primate to its heights and often represents its irksome obstacles to its potential flourishing. The watery chasm that divides the two isles began as a vast ocean. Standing atop even the tallest mount that represented humanity’s best theories of antiquity offered only fleeting views of all that animated and ailed its most elusive subject. Fortunately, it is now a narrowing straight. A relatively tame body of water that allows regular traffic. Today, occasional jaunts between the humanities, a field that directly addresses the human condition and the material sciences can offer even the casually inquisitive among us a better understanding of our place along the arrow of time. How a conscious being is like and unlike the undulations of physical matter.
At times the water appears to still, allowing an informative, if distorted, reflective pool for humanity. Yet there is one journey that cognitive bias seekers need to take in order to gain the clarity necessary to meet the Nietzschean criticism of material theorizing. In order to properly chart the coastal contours of humanity’ weal and woe, better come to grips with how we coarse-grain an otherwise chaotic reality into an intelligible and extended order. The construction of human values is the most critical juncture in understanding our place in the arc of life and perhaps the cosmos. It captures our distinction and demarks the greatest journey in our trials.
The answer lies in our art. The view from the longest jut of humanity’s sciences to its, well, soul is within the aesthetic realm. The cave paintings depicting anthropomorphized beast of a hunting tribe, the beguiling melody of a well tuned Lyre. More than anything, however, our morality and normatively bound civil order is expressed and sustained in narrative. The simple story arcs that explode as in a kaleidoscope similar to Mandelbrot’s fractals are the foundation of our imagined communities. Granting us the providential power to but what otherwise is tethered to a material reality, reify social reality.
Stories are indeed are greatest cognitive bias. The cheesy and, at times, stupfying talisman is at the heart what keeps us more parochial and inward than we otherwise would be. Prevents us from taking the necessary jaunts that afford us the wisdom of theoretical progress. Yet they are precisely what allows us to make the journey in the first place. To become an Übermensch, to live our best lives, we need to understand, we need to further master our dramatic structures.
ExhibitingBias 