Quite funny when hearing yourself think "Yeah this is confirming my own thoughts" and then you stop and think about what you just read.
Confirmation biasception?
Cognitive bias cheat sheet
51–60 of 143 posts
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#52Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#53I'm impressed that he managed to figure this out whilst taking care of a baby. When my son was born, I spent most of the wee hours testing which Star Wars theme I hummed worked best for getting him back to sleep. (By the way, The Imperial March worked best, especially slowed down and rocking him on every 4th beat)
This was my first reaction as well. Paternity leave is not what I'd call an opportunity for deep thoughts and pondering. He must have had a very good baby!
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#54This is cool, although the real trick is knowing when and how to employ methods that will mitigate the problems caused by cognitive bias to accurately identify and resolve conflicts and facilitate clear decision-making. This is the purpose of courts, the purpose of peer review, the purpose of debate. Generally, it is not necessary to understand every single type of cognitive bias in a nuanced way to mitigate the prob…
Can you share a link to the video?
He's spoken about it in a number of forums, take your pick: http://righteousmind.com/viewpoint-diversity/ (near the bottom).
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#55Nicely done.
I like to refer to it as "short-cut thinking" rather than cognitive bias, because people that might not know the term immediately understand what I'm getting at.
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#56To summarize biases further, in one word: Incompetence. Lab results confirming cognitive biases come from testing small groups of students (up to 200). Among other things, it means: (1) respondents with similar background, so we can't generalize (2) respondents don't care about outcomes, (3) tests are synthetic. Plus publication bias and other standard issues. These results are themselves a sort of confirmation bias.…
It's not that simple. Some cognitive biases, especially related to shortcuts in decision making, are more prevalent in smarter people. Here's a good jumping off point: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-peopl... I highly recommend reading more of Daniel Kahneman's work if you find the above interesting.
I'm interested in the questionnaire they mention.
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#57To summarize biases further, in one word: Incompetence. Lab results confirming cognitive biases come from testing small groups of students (up to 200). Among other things, it means: (1) respondents with similar background, so we can't generalize (2) respondents don't care about outcomes, (3) tests are synthetic. Plus publication bias and other standard issues. These results are themselves a sort of confirmation bias.…
Of course someone would come into the comments and try to rationalize why this doesn't apply to him, and why he's a special snowflake who can do no wrong.
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#58This is cool, although the real trick is knowing when and how to employ methods that will mitigate the problems caused by cognitive bias to accurately identify and resolve conflicts and facilitate clear decision-making. This is the purpose of courts, the purpose of peer review, the purpose of debate. Generally, it is not necessary to understand every single type of cognitive bias in a nuanced way to mitigate the prob…
I would agree. For me, the most important thing to know is that there are biases that could be impacting me and to always leave room for a) a competing viewpoint can be sincerely held and possibly correct over the viewpoint I am convinced of, and b) to always ask myself if there is a self interested reason I want the belief I hold to be true.
Many biases cannot be overcome even with knowing about them... but accepting that it's possible I'm wrong and that the crazy guy on the other side is both sincere in his competing belief and possibly correct, allows me to evolve and learn and ultimately get along with more people.
I have some strongly held beliefs and opinions...But I try to keep my mind open and without considering cognitive biases, you are going to be more close minded than you should be in most cases.
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#59"The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world." So wonderfully said. I wonder what biases AI will develop in its models
I once heard that our senses primarily function as filters. I.e. our eyes only see by filtering out all sorts of other visual stimuli, our ears hear by filtering out other noises, etc...
That means that we are only capturing a "tiny sliver" of whats actually happening around us.
If we only keep this small detail in mind we can be sure that lack of evidence is never proof of anything and that any evidence we do see can only be used to find the most probable of competing hypotheses and its diagnosticity should always be considered. (i.e. fever might mean you are sick but has no diagnostic value to what particular ailment you have since its consistent with other possibilities.)
Same goes for using bounce rate as a metric for web analysis...its diagnostic value on its own doesnt tell us much, but with other context, like time on site and conversion goal of site (i.e. a phone call conversion will register as a bounce if they dont navihate elsewhere.) It can tell us a lot.
Re: Cognitive bias cheat sheet
#60This reminds me of master persuader Scott Adams mentioned about "cognitive dissonance"[1] on some of his recent tweets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
His book is really interesting and an easy read. I guess it pays off to write things as simple as possible. https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still-eboo... The one thing to take away from this election is that persuasion trumps everything else. It's scary and crazy!
Another thing to take away from this election is that Scott Adams turns out to be somewhat of a moron when discussing the topic of presidential politics.
I followed his arguments in the primaries and found them somewhat compelling, the idea that Trump was in better shape than people thought. But he's lately gone of the rails totally and completely.
And more to the point of this post, he completely misuses the phrase cognitive dissonance, having apparently defined it to mean something like "a way to tell people who disagree with me they don't know what they're talking about" rather than an actual psychological characteristic.