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Guide to cognitive biases

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101–104 of 104 posts

Re: Guide to cognitive biases

#101
This website is merely ok. Summary: 5/5 in science communication; educators and scientists should learn from its brilliant innovations. 2/5 in psychology, with deep knowledge but severe errors and misunderstandings.

Here's a full list of every page I saw (no selection bias!) and my evaluations.

Anchoring heuristic: this category is not accurate. Anchoring takes two forms: as a priming effect, or as insufficient adjustment from a starting point. Instead, this category lists "Confirmation bias, Echo chamber, Effort justification bias, Escalation of commitment bias, Hindsight bias, Illusion of transparency, Self-fulfilling prophecy". None of these relate to anchoring either directly or through mechanisms. The omission of anchoring, a major effect, is glaring.

Automation bias: the effect as described in the article is not even correct. There is an automation bias, but there is also the opposite anti-automation bias, where humans unfairly disregard the opinions of machines in some contexts, such as algorithmic recipe recommendations. Their CDS example is poorly chosen and barely illustrates the subject. There is a better example from the literature, where humans accept the results of a blatantly wrong calculator over their own estimates. In addition, automation bias is frequently justified even when compared to human "rational" thinking, as summarized in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Ch 21.

I recall this quote from Gelman: "Duncan notes that many common sayings contradict each other. For example, The early bird catches the worm, but The early worm is eaten by the bird." This page on automation bias is no better than one of two contradictory sayings.

I like the three meters, of literature, impact, and replication. Their existence is a well-thought and marvelous insight on science communication. It's a giant improvement over resources from 10 years ago, when such meters were barely considered by psychologists, much less communicators.

I like that they cited references to research papers. I like that they describe how the experiments measure the effect. These are major advantages over comparable websites.

Representativeness heuristic: this category is not accurate. Base rate and conjunction fit. The rest do not.

Base rate neglect: the explanation is quite bad. Kahneman's theory is much more careful and requires huge contortion in "just-so" stories to fit experiments, about how statistical base rates are not always statistical. (I believe his contortions are correct.) But this page doesn't even attempt to describe what qualifies as a "base rate".

The Trump example is a loose fit and the test example is so vague as to be meaningless. The examples in the literature, with criminal identification and test positivity rates, have better writing.

Conjunction fallacy: don't pick that famous Linda example if you have to explain all its linguistic caveats. Your explanations are not convincing, just assertions which the reader can't tell the truth of. (And there are better explanations, like replication under single evaluation vs joint evaluation, or replications with clarifying language, which are not given.) Nevertheless, this page is broadly correct. It is over-specific, focusing on the direct violation of conjunction rather than the representativeness process that underlies the probability estimation, but perhaps the specificity is justified if one wants to hew to the literature.

About->Our team: oh my god, the authors are psychology PhD students. I think psychology needs more academic interest from students, so that graduate programs can have stricter filtering. This website does not give hope that psychology will cast off its bad reputation soon.

Re: Guide to cognitive biases

#102
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I’ve read Kahnemann’s book, and hadn’t considered how to integrate it with TFA. The sheer number of cognitive biases presented in TFA, and the overlap of the categorisations had me bamboozled. But yeah, if these are System 1 staples then I can imagine how they might have made do for regular people for a long time. Some biases and prejudices affirm survival in a less civilised setting eg prehistoric tribe…

Check out this one on a large screen: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv... While still bamboozling, it brings some order and visual overview (in a beatiful way IMO), plus links for further study. All credit for posting it belongs to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168269

Excellent. This diagram provides context and accessibility to the subject matter that was missing from TFA.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Re: Guide to cognitive biases

#103
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a fallacious argument because it does not follow (non-sequitur) that the beliefs of scientists can cause shifts in reality, but nobody was arguing that. They were arguing that it is logical to conclude that climate change is real because the overwhelming consensus among climate scientists (the actual domain experts) is that it is real.

That's not an argument that deals with whether climate change is real or not – but whether it's reasonable to believe it is, based on one's own lack of understanding in combination with making (reasonable) assumptions.

It is an argument that the consensus of the overwhelming majority of experts on any given subject with such a consensus is strong evidence for that position.

Re: Guide to cognitive biases

#104
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Media is playing a part here, ironicaly because "not blindly trusting the authority" and "presenting a balanced view of facts" is good for ratings Yes, this is part of it. Of course scientists are wrong sometimes, but it's in someone's interest to stoke general distrust.

Suppose you are the ruler of a country which views geopolitics as a zero-sum game, because your goals are incompatible with those of other nations. It is therefore in your interest to cause other governments to be distracted with internal mistrust and divisions and health crises, so that there isn't a strong unified position to take action on the world stage. As a test of this theory, look at which countries have thi…

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