Using the information available to you and not excluding a person’s judgment in situations where they could reasonably be called ‘biased’ is the standard practise in places like Y Combinator and OpenPhil. OpenPhil writes about this in the classic post Hits-based Giving. A relevant quote (emphasis in original):
We don’t: put extremely high weight on avoiding conflicts of interest, intellectual “bubbles” or “echo chambers.”
...In some cases, this risk may be compounded by social connections. When hiring specialists in specific causes, we’ve explicitly sought people with deep experience and strong connections in a field. Sometimes, that means our program officers are friends with many of the people who are best suited to be our advisors and grantees.
...it sometimes happens that it’s difficult to disentangle the case for a grant from the relationships around it.[2] When these situations occur, there’s a greatly elevated risk that we aren’t being objective, and aren’t weighing the available evidence and arguments reasonably. If our goal were to find the giving opportunities most strongly supported by evidence, this would be a major problem. But the drawbacks for a “hits-based” approach are less clear, and the drawbacks of too strongly avoiding these situations would, in my view, be unacceptable.
Using the information available to you and not excluding a person’s judgment in situations where they could reasonably be called ‘biased’ is the standard practise in places like Y Combinator and OpenPhil. OpenPhil writes about this in the classic post Hits-based Giving. A relevant quote (emphasis in original):