Overcoming bias

Not strictly virtualization-related, but overcoming bias is one of the more consistently interesting cross-disciplinary blogs I've come across. The same sorts of cognitive biases that cause people to make bad decisions about their happiness, finances, political preferences, etc., often cause errors in software engineering. Pawing through Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases, I can associate almost every single bias with one (or more) mistakes I've made in my professional life. Optimism bias? Zounds, what engineer isn't guilty of it on a daily bias? Information bias has often led me to waste hours in debugging collecting useless trivia. Some have even entered the lore of computing; ingroup bias is nothing but "NIH syndrome."

While "overcoming bias" is certainly a laudable goal in many professional fields, I wonder about its tractability. These biases are clearly hardwired, and I suspect no amount of mindfulness will prevent us from committing them. Getting rid of one of these well-attested biases would probably require the neurological equivalent of, e.g., making humans able to digest grass, or giving a human the VO2Max of a horse. Oh well; if nothing else, at least being aware of our limitations as thinking machines might prevent us from trying anything too impossibly stupid...