First of all, how nice to see this kind of post from you, been quite a while I'd say, can't even remember the last time I may have read one.
The thing I've struggled with on Hive with issues and debates, has often been that the people you're arguing/debating with have most of the time not seemed rational, at least about things in regards to downvotes. I have often tried to look at a broader picture and often also attempted to ask more neutral people about each example, but that part hasn't been easy neither partly due to my influence making me often believe that the way some respond may be biased by their own interests in how it may affect our "relationship".
The pool in terms of debating things with rational people and getting opinions from those saying things directly without assuming it may impact their future performance in terms of curation hasn't been big (or me being unsure if they're speaking freely), luckily we also have quite a lot of leeway of being able to use downvotes "as you please" even though I don't agree with many of them and have my own parameters of when I think it's necessary to be used.
Ugh, kinda regret using the downvots as an example now but was the first thing that came to mind where I think bias's have quite a big effect on how everyone sees them.
I think in the past I was definitely an optimist about most things, over the years, though, especially in my early 30s I think I've been moving towards realist/pessimist a bit more, the latter especially about certain things and I think everything happening around the world has been attributing to it.
In regards to beliefs, I'm not really sure what I consider myself, I really dislike the whole belief system and especially people trying to "save" others gives me the creeps and really annoys me how some spend their time. While I may not agree with the majority there it's also impossible to say if there isn't something else, so I guess I wouldn't call myself an atheist either. The whole odds of you and me existing, at this point in time in the history of earth and the universe which against many odds is habitable while we're circling around a gas giant that circles around a black hole, it's all kind of too insane to think it has happened by chance. That and the science showing that if we somehow don't kill ourselves for a little longer the technology to re-create everything we know in a simulation space isn't far off seems to point that this is most likely not the base reality we all think it is. So while I don't believe in most of the religions, maybe we are the gods out there in another layer where we live forever, there's no war, money or problems but we're just bored enough to re-live random simulations and try and make them as entertaining and crazy as possible which according to recent events the past few years seems more likely to be the case. :P
Anyway, great post, hope you've been able to work more on your information project, looking forward to it and more posts like these!
This in itself is a form of cognitive bias - it's only because your human brain is too pathetic to understand the larger numbers. If you had a superhuman brain 4x the volume like my own, the 'insanity' of it all might actually seem pretty reasonable, perhaps even inevitable given the initial conditions of the early universe. After all, there's only so many combinations of atoms you can get.
Fun fact, Given a large enough universe, those combinations run out and start to repeat themselves. It's entirely possible there's another you out there right now reading a similar comment on Jive.clog. Not a parallel universe, but this very one, simply by mathematical randomness! If you think about it, any number that isn't infinite is, by definition, pretty small, so statistically it wouldn't even be that surprising. For a superior mobbs brain, at least.
I just think the odds that we've grown inwards rather than outwards in the base layer is higher than the chance of chaos/randomness to lead to this being the base layer.
In a broader context, I think your discussion of bias associated with downvoting does point to another frequent cause of bias: monetary concerns. People often become biased on a topic if it affects their personal financial status.