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Comment by GoblinSlayer | Hacker News Reader

That's just FUD. If reality was difficult to discern, we would long be extinct.

Reality is difficult to discern and we are not extinct. Cognitive bias has a long history of existing. For example, attributing personal flaws to harmless mistakes and attributing the flaws of others to malice or incompetence. This is clearly a distortion of reality, because we cannot assume we know the intention or capacity of all other people who aren’t perfect.

(A huge number of other evidences that sober people don’t have a full grasp of reality also exist: people misremember things all the time. People mishear things all the time. Check out that internet debate about the black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress!)

Cognitive bias doesn't exist in perception, it's interpretation, and attributions are even thoretization. Difficulty of classification is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of classification. If we can't name the color, it doesn't mean we don't see the color as it is.

Interpretation informs perception and perception isn't some constant in the human experience. A difficulty of classification can absolutely be a problem of perception because none of these things exist in a vacuum. Literally every human interpretation of reality is at best an approximate summary of what we experience of reality because it's impossible to remove bias and, believe it or not, we still don't know everything.

We don't know everything, but we discern reality just fine. Those are two different claims.

Sure, we discern reality, but that doesn't mean our perception isn't biased or correct.

Seemingly you talk about interpretation and theoretization, not perception. We have problem with building far reaching theories based on perception, but an error in a theory is not a bias in perception, see the color example above.

I don't think that's at all accurate.

We have evolved to perceive some aspects of reality (the ones where perceiving them improves survival/reproduction) and to not perceive many other aspects of reality because those aspects of reality do not affect survival/reproduction success enough to make up for the cost of having the more accurate perception.

The aspects that improve survival are pretty big and their perception is accurate and that's how we study nature - by augmenting our perception with tools.

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