Eldrae Cognative Question

I know one of the big things of the eldrae cognitive structure is that there are no in-built cognitive biases.

Did they manage to retain the one that keeps eldrae parents from strangling their kids when their one-year-old wakes them up at 2 AM? And 2:15 AM? And 2:30 AM? And 2:35 AM? And 2:36 AM? You’ve changed their diaper so many times it’s all muscle memory at this point. Your nipples are not-fun sore. And, you know that if you try to go back to bed, your wife is going to elbow you in that painful spot until you get up and look at the kid, because she’s been doing it for the last 96 hours and was starting to get the interesting hallucinations.

“no in-built cognitive biases.” isn’t quite right. For one, cognitive biases are sort of a matter of design, design limitations, and just plain wants.

Biases generally only get named as such when they’re malign, or benign but noticeable. The tendency to continue investing when further investment is neutral or disadvantageous has bitten a lot of people in the ass, so it’s been named the gamblers fallacy.

But there’s also the tendency to invest time and money into offspring, even when you don’t get any sort of time or money back, and even when said child does things you disagree with. And that’s never really termed as a bias.

Put simply, there are some things about intelligences that will simply be arbitrary. They want things, and they want them simply because they want them; there’s not really a base reason, or at least whatever reason was originally there no longer applies (and they don’t care). For humans and heavily-modified offshoots like the eldrae, they like music and tasty food, they laugh and they’re curious, and they have sympathy and love. All of these things can be rather inconvenient from time to time just like named biases, but they keep them around because they want them, or rather they are wants.

They tried making a AI without any of these base wants at a time. It worked perfectly… and did absolutely nothing: The Four Unlaws | The Eldraeverse
They’re still not quite sure if that qualifies as a mental illness worthy of intervention.

Now, as for what the eldrae don’t have, that’s more complicated. Keep in mind, they were originally modified by precursors to be, essentially, highly autonomous slaves capable of maintaining complex machinery and performing other difficult tasks. As such they nixed all sorts of things that would impact rational decision-making, along with a lot else. There are a dozen articles on the ‘lot else’, but in short it didn’t seem to affect child-rearing much. Also, it’s perfectly possible that the precursors made the babies less irritating as well.

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I’d like to point out that in the present-day Eldraeverse babies can receive in-vitro education, so the Eldrae themselves are making their babies less irritating.

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