494 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2021
    1. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

  2. Aug 2021
    1. The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

      Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

      Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

      Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

      Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

      Some core ideas of critical race theory:

      • racial realism
        • racism is normal
      • interest convergence
        • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
      • Whiteness as property
        • Cheryl Harris' work
        • White people have privilege in the law
        • myth of meritocracy
      • Intersectionality

      People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

      Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

      Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

      KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

      SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

      • Law enforcement got upset and the school district
      • Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
      • Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

      It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

      What are you afraid of?

    1. Named after Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

      People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.

      Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.

      I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?

  3. Jul 2021
    1. Prof Nichola Raihani on Twitter: “Submitted a paper reporting null results to a mid tier journal. Guess how it went. I literally don’t care at this point but I do feel bad for the first author (who I won’t name here). Https://t.co/sX5lTcEl29” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved July 16, 2021, from https://twitter.com/nicholaraihani/status/1415308025179656194

    1. The researchers started with 140,000 hours of YouTube videos of people talking in diverse situations. Then, they designed a program that created clips a few seconds long with the mouth movement for each phoneme, or word sound, annotated. The program filtered out non-English speech, nonspeaking faces, low-quality video, and video that wasn’t shot straight ahead. Then, they cropped the videos around the mouth. That yielded nearly 4000 hours of footage, including more than 127,000 English words.

      The time and effort required to put together this dataset is significant in itself. So much of the data we need to train algorithms simply doesn't exist in a useful format. However, the more we need to manipulate the raw information, the more likely we are to insert our own biases.

    1. at least two of the following symptoms:

      This means that by design the trial would MISS asymptomatic COVID19 cases that nevertheless make up a substantial proportion (about 60% of covid cases). But this was mitigated by taking monthly swabs for Category 2 participants.

    2. per-protocol population

      Why was the decision of per-protocol taken if the study was blinded to the participants and the study personnel BUT unblinded to the analysts?

    3. Participants, investigators, study coordinators, 126study-related personnel, and the sponsor were masked to the treatment group allocation, and 127masked study nursesat each site were responsible for vaccine preparation and administration

      That still leaves open the role of unblinded data analysts. Why were they not blinded as well or at least made agnostic as to the status of the allocation. How was allocation concealment achieved and why was this not described here?

    4. adult volunteers 18 years

      How did they mitigate self-report bias?

  4. Jun 2021
    1. Betsch, C., & Sachse, K. (2013). Debunking vaccination myths: Strong risk negations can increase perceived vaccination risks. Health Psychology: Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 32(2), 146–155. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027387

    1. . For example, if a miscalling occurs at the end of a hairpin in a top strand read, the bottom strand read would correctly basecall this sequence before the hairpin is encountered

      strand bias example

  5. May 2021
    1. Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

      • Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
      • the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

      It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

  6. Apr 2021
    1. I admit I'm biased, having bought this game for fifty cents at the time I did. I also have a general love of mouse movement-based games, and find other options in the way of gaming, Steam and otherwise, underwhelming in supply.
    1. Other physicists and mathematicians at the turn of the century came close to arriving at what is currently known as spacetime. Einstein himself noted, that with so many people unraveling separate pieces of the puzzle, "the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905."

      Interesting. This acts as evidence for the hypothesis that environments/conditions are powerful forcing functions.

      It also acts as evidence against the argument of the "lone genius".

    1. Oh, and it focuses on Russia and Eastern Europe, with cities like Olonets, Torun, Solovski, Kobuleti, Skopje etc in the Easy difficulty setting.
    2. Maybe use more cities from South/West Europe, too?
  7. Mar 2021
    1. Such research drew from Baruch Fischhoff's work in 1975 surrounding hindsight bias, a cognitive bias that knowing the outcome of a certain event makes it seem more predictable than may actually be true.[5] Research conducted by Fischhoff revealed that participants did not know that their outcome knowledge affected their responses, and, if they did know, they could still not ignore or defeat the effects of the bias.
    1. Griffith, G. J., Morris, T. T., Tudball, M. J., Herbert, A., Mancano, G., Pike, L., Sharp, G. C., Sterne, J., Palmer, T. M., Davey Smith, G., Tilling, K., Zuccolo, L., Davies, N. M., & Hemani, G. (2020). Collider bias undermines our understanding of COVID-19 disease risk and severity. Nature Communications, 11(1), 5749. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19478-2

    1. The elimination of what is arguably the biggest monoculture in the history of software development would mean that we, the community, could finally take charge of both languages and run-times, and start to iterate and grow these independently of browser/server platforms, vendors, and organizations, all pulling in different directions, struggling for control of standards, and (perhaps most importantly) freeing the entire community of developers from the group pressure of One Language To Rule Them All.
    2. JavaScript needs to fly from its comfy nest, and learn to survive on its own, on equal terms with other languages and run-times. It’s time to grow up, kid.
    3. If JavaScript were detached from the client and server platforms, the pressure of being a monoculture would be lifted — the next iteration of the JavaScript language or run-time would no longer have to please every developer in the world, but instead could focus on pleasing a much smaller audience of developers who love JavaScript and thrive with it, while enabling others to move to alternative languages or run-times.
  8. Feb 2021
    1. When hiring managers believed a woman had children because “Parent-Teacher Association coordinator appeared on her resume, she was 79% less likely to be hired. If she was hired, she would be offered an average of $11,000 less in salary.

      I recall when learning how to do interviews once, the person who was helping me made a comment along the lines of -

      one of the things I look for is an engagement ring, as it's a sign that they are getting married soon - and want the job just to get mat leave

      I remember being rather shocked by that statement, and I didn't speak up about it at that time directly - although did push back against it a bit, but it's one of those memories that really stood out as 'wow, that is kind of messed up'

    2. Someone from another department incorrectly assumes that the man on your team is the leader. Gently correct the assumption and underscore your leader’s accomplishments. For example, “[Name] is our team lead. She heads all our biggest sales efforts.”

      I've seen this happen before - assuming that the male is the leader, or the one that had the idea - and can diminish the recognition of the right people.

      Correcting this on the spot can be done quickly

    3. “Gender bias holds women back from being hired and advancing in their careers. It’s important to be aware of how that manifests,” says Raena Saddler from Lean In. That’s why Lean In created an activity that helps you combat gender bias at work. It’s called 50 Ways to Fight Bias, and the digital versions are free. Raena explains, “This activity is an engaging way to think through your own biases and call out and navigate bias when you see it in the wild.”

      we all have biases, conscious and unconscious - being aware of these, and knowing at what points to look out for them is important.

    1. Hodcroft, E. B., Domman, D. B., Oguntuyo, K., Snyder, D. J., Diest, M. V., Densmore, K. H., Schwalm, K. C., Femling, J., Carroll, J. L., Scott, R. S., Whyte, M. M., Edwards, M. D., Hull, N. C., Kevil, C. G., Vanchiere, J. A., Lee, B., Dinwiddie, D. L., Cooper, V. S., & Kamil, J. P. (2021). Emergence in late 2020 of multiple lineages of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein variants affecting amino acid position 677. MedRxiv, 2021.02.12.21251658. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.12.21251658

    1. Frame of reference has been manipulatedCrime statistics are often manipulated for political purposes by comparing to a year when crime was very high. This can expressed either as a change (down 60% since 2004) or via an index (40, where 2004 = 100). In either of these cases, 2004 may or may not be an appropriate year for comparison. It could have been an unusually high crime year.This also happens when comparing places. If I want to make one country look bad, I simply express the data about it relative to whichever country which is doing the best.This problem tends to crop up in subjects where people have a strong confirmation bias. (“Just as I thought, crime is up!”) Whenever possible try comparing rates from several different starting points to see how the numbers shift. And whatever you do, don’t use this technique yourself to make a point you think is important. That’s inexcusable.

      This is an important point and when politicians are speaking it, they should cite their sources meticulously.

  9. Jan 2021
    1. Watched

      [[Verna Myers]]: [[How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them]] [[Ted Talk]]

      Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we've seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Verna Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

      "Stare at awesome black people."

      Look for discomfirming data

      "Walk toward your discomfort."

      When you see something, have the courage to say something. ie "We don't say those things anymore."

  10. Dec 2020
    1. Stuaert Rtchie [@StuartJRitchie] (2020) This encapsulates the problem nicely. Sure, there’s a paper. But actually read it & what do you find? p-values mostly juuuust under .05 (a red flag) and a sample size that’s FAR less than “25m”. If you think this is in any way compelling evidence, you’ve totally been sold a pup. Twitter. Retrieved from:https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1305963050302877697

    1. No tech team or web guy needed!There are no complicated steps or approvals from managers and your IT department when it comes to marketing your podcast.

      This seems painfully gendered. RadioPublic could do better.

  11. Nov 2020
    1. bias

      I’d like to know what evidence Proctorio can offer to support this claim. The company often says it’s up to the teacher (or in my experience, a staff member) to review a student’s video and then decide if the behavior flagged by the algorithm as suspicious constitutes cheating. But the teacher or staff member cannot help but hold implicit biases in addition to any explicit biases they may possess. So how can Proctorio prove their software eliminates bias? And what other forms and sources of bias are built into the software?

    1. Unconscious Bias still seems to be the hottest topic right now and the most likely topic to get you started on your organization’s Diversity & Inclusion journey. Its universal and approachable nature (vs. talking about racism or privilege in plain terms, for example) might just be the key to opening many other doors to advance inclusion in the workplace.

      approaching it as [[unconscious bias]] training may get the ball rolling, we need to do more than that.

    1. When a piece of fabric is cut on the bias and sewn from the bias it has a tendency to create interesting drapes and to enhance the style of a garment. It is just so with human biases. Within an incarnated human’s life there will be a continuing and continuous experience of seeing things from a particular bias or slant, and then being able to choose to rethink and re-vision and see things from the opposite bias.

      This reminds me of the Train up a child verse. That part that says, "in the way he should go" is the Hebrew concept of taste or bent or what this model is calling BIAS. Which sounds even more solid, "Train up a child according to his/her bias and when they are old they won't depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6)

    2. There is nothing but bias. There is nothing but distortion in all of the nested illusions of your creation.

      Ra used "distortion" in ways that communicated good or bad according to the hearer's "bias".

    1. mentally examine, as with the scalpel of a surgeon, each bias which you can remember.

      Mentally examine each bias. Observing with your mind the "biases" that you adopted, adapted, accepted.

  12. Oct 2020
    1. But she felt that even the grave bedroom knew her for what she was, shallow, tinkling, vain...

      Ouch! I like how the omnipresent narrators in Mansfields' stories are so not objective, like goggles through which we must see the world. Exposed to merely a few short scenes from which we extrapolate to the characters' entire personas, our judgments are very susceptible to the narrators' stance. There's little room for us to perceive Isabel as the martyr, or her friends as exuberant rather than shallow, or William as an ignorant, sullen person who doesn't care much about his family. I wonder if/how narrators' subjectivity could be measured by inspecting adjectives in unquoted lines (e.g., how to distinguish between a description of a person in a scene and a description of a person in general).

    1. And though flags from this software don’t automatically mean students will be penalized—instructors can review the software’s suspicions and decide for themselves how to proceed—it leaves open the possibility that instructors’ own biases will determine whether to bring academic dishonesty charges against students. Even just an accusation could negatively affect a student’s academic record, or at the very least how their instructor perceives them and their subsequent work.

      The companies are hiding behind this as a feature - that the algorithms are not supposed to be implemented without human review. I wonder how this "feature" will interact with implicit (and explicit) biases, or with the power dynamics between adjuncts, students, and departmental administration.

      The companies are caught between a rock and a hard place in the decision whether students should be informed that their attempt was flagged for review, or not. We see that, if the student is informed, it causes stress and pain and damage to the teacher-student relationship. But if they're not informed, all these issues of bias and power become invisible.

    2. To make matters worse, her proctor kept calling her “sweetheart.”

      I'd like to see more reporting on this - who exactly are these proctors we're outsourcing our teaching to? How are they screened? What's their code of conduct? How is a complaint registered?

    1. The stories added meaning that couldn’t be matched by facts and figures about the items for sale. Meaning can be very difficult to pull off in design, but sto-ries create cognitive fluency around meaning. Our minds love narratives because they love patterns; stories are like really well-packaged patterns. Beginning, middle, and end. Connect-ing that pattern to an object or action in your design can be achieved, in part, by making sure your design accommodates story—whether in the metaphorical sense of how the page is structured (i.e., the page has a clear beginning, middle, and end) or the more literal sense of actually making sure the design leaves room for text that tells a story.

      This can also be leveraged to help improve one's memory.

    2. Student evaluations of teachers are notoriously biased against women, with women routinely receiving lower scores than their male counterparts.

      I recall some work on this sort of gender bias in job recommendations as well. Remember to dig it up for reference as well.

    3. If the original price is horizontally farther away on the page from the sale price (Fig 2.8), the customer is more likely to view it as a better deal, even if the dollar amounts do not change. We equate visual distance with fiscal distance (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-19/).
  13. Sep 2020
    1. Consider, for instance, the footage that has been circulating from a New York City Council hearing, held over Zoom in June, which shows Krug in her Afro-Latinx pose. She introduces herself as Jess La Bombalera, a nickname apparently of her own making, adapted from Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican genre of music and dance. Broadcasting live from “El Barrio,” and wearing purple-tinted shades and a hoop in her nose, she lambasts gentrifiers, shouts out her “black and brown siblings,” and twice calls out “white New Yorkers” for not yielding their speaking time. What stands out, though, is the way Krug speaks, in a patchy accent that begins with thickly rolled “R”s and transitions into what can best be described as B-movie gangster. This is where desire outruns expertise. The Times, in a piece on Krug’s exposure, last week, nonetheless called this a “Latina accent,” lending credence to Krug’s performance. (The phrase was later deleted.) The offhand notation is a tiny example of the buy-in Krug has been afforded her entire scholastic career, by advisers and committee members and editors and colleagues. They failed to recognize the gap not between real and faux, so much, as between something thrown-on and something lived-in. That inattentiveness was Krug’s escape hatch.

      If nothing else, this is indicative of human cognitive bias. We'll tend to take at face value what is presented to us, but then once we "know" our confirmation bias will kick in on the other direction.

      I'm curious if there were examples of anyone calling out her accent contemporaneously? We're also stuck with the bias of wanting to go with the majority view. When you're the lone voice, you're less likely to speak up. This is also evinced in the story of her previous colleagues who had "gut feelings" that something was wrong, but didn't say anything or do any research at the time.

    1. Over time we tend to develop confirmation bias, forever seeking evidence that reinforces what we already believe, and downplaying or dismissing what doesn’t. We’re also designed, both genetically and instinctively, to put our own safety first, and to avoid taking too much risk. Rather than using our capacity for critical thinking to assess new possibilities, we often co-opt our prefrontal cortex to rationalize choices that were actually driven by our emotions.
    1. loss aversion. We are way more scared of losing what we have than excited about getting something new.
    2. This super-sketchy experiment had one final phase, how-ever: reconciliation. After successive scenarios were deployed where the Rattlers and the Eagles had common goals (unblock-ing a shared water supply, repairing a truck, etc.) they grew closer, even splitting drinks at the end (malts, come on people). In our work, we may not call them Rattlers and Eagles. Instead, we may call them IT and Legal and Marketing. Or “weird-code-name product-team one” versus “weird-code-name product-team two”. But if organizations incentivize based on scarcity and self-interest, we might as well just call it what it is, a scaled version of the Robbers Cave experiment. And to mitigate the siloing and combat ingroup bias, we’ll have to consider following a different approach.

      How can we do this for the democrats and the republicans?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. WEIRD people have a bad habit of universalizing from their own particularities. They think everyone thinks the way they do, and some of them (not all, of course) reinforce that assumption by studying themselves. In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.

      This is a painful reality. It's also even more specific to the current Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do.

      This is the sort of example that David Dylan Thomas will appreciate.

    1. “Motivation conditions cognition,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, wisely told me. Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.
  14. Aug 2020
    1. A fascinating viewpoint on social media, journalism, and information. There are some great implied questions for web designers hiding in here.

    2. In discussing the appeal of the News Feed in that same interview with Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg observed, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The statement is grotesque not because it’s false — it’s completely true — but because it’s a category error. It yokes together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different scale and import. And yet, in his tone-deaf way, Zuckerberg managed to express the reality of content collapse. When it comes to information, social media renders category errors obsolete.

      How can we minimize this sort of bias? How can we help to increase the importance of truly important things?

    1. The real enemy of independent thinking is not any external authority, but our own inertia. We need to find ways to counteract confirmation bias – our tendency to take into account only information that confirms what we already believe. We need to regularly confront our errors, mistakes, and misunderstandings. 
    1. name-pronunciation effect. And it’s exactly what you would expect. People with names you find easy to pronounce are viewed more favorably than those with names deemed difficult to pronounce, which can lead to pro-motions, votes, and more.
    2. http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-33/

      I've been wondering about what I perceive as a dreadful editorial choice in how these footnote links have been done. Given the book however, I'm also now wondering if this is consciously done by design to provide a blindfold of sorts to prevent bias either for or against these sources.

      Either way I, still wish they were more traditionally done and/or presented. I at least wish I had the added context about them on their respective pages.

    3. The framing effect, which is the bias the above examples exploit, is in my opinion the most dangerous bias in the world.
    4. What if, as in the case of anonymous résumés, the DA had no clue about the race of the accused? For that matter, what if you also removed identifying information on the victim and even the location of the crime? In 2019, the San Francisco DA’s office began anonymous charging, removing potentially biasing information from crime reports DAs use to decide whether or not to bring charges (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-30/). It’s too soon to tell the outcome of that experiment but, again, the removal of a decisive element may enhance an experience rather than detract from it.

      Another way to potentially approach this is to take the biasing information and reduce the charging by statistical means to negate the biased effects?

      Separately, how can this be done at the street level to allow policing resources to find and prosecute white collar criminals who may be having a more profoundly deleterious effect on society?

    5. As designers, we’re used to finding clever ways to reveal information to the user. But anonymous résumés challenge us with the notion that sometimes less information can lead to better decisions. We need to find artful ways to conceal infor-mation that might be biasing, even if true.
    6. mere-exposure effect, which occurs when you like something simply because you’ve seen it before. What’s remarkable about this effect is that it works even if you don’t remember seeing the thing before!
    7. you voted for Obama AND Hillary, fer cryin’ out loud!)

      There's some implicit statistical bias here because this likely isn't true for about half of the readership, presuming that they're American in the first place, which is another bias...

    8. we aren’t gullible so much as efficient. We tend to believe things that are easy for our minds to process.
    9. By the way, just to get back to notational bias for a sec, the term “dark pattern” is problematic for reasons that should be clear if you think about it for a minute or two so let’s collectively start working on better language for that. Mmmmkay?

      Naming is hard, but it would have been nice to have a suggestion or two of alternates here.

    10. Immune neglect describes another failure of affective fore-casting, specifically around predicting our ability to cope with adverse outcomes.
    11. Our memories protect at all costs the idea that we’re good decision-makers.
    12. The interaction has been architected to benefit the grocer. It could just as easily have been architected to benefit the customer by putting the freshest fruit on top.

      There's also another bias going on here. We're biased to buy more when the shelves are heavily stocked, even if a lot of the food will ultimately go bad. So the grocer looses out because they often will sell far less than they stock.

    13. There’s even a bias called the bias blind spot,where you think you’re not biased but you’re sure everybody else is.
    14. Confirmation bias is pretty much what you think it is. You get an idea in your head and you go looking for evidence to confirm that it’s true. If any evidence comes up to challenge it, you cry “Fake news!” and move on with your life.
    15. We call these errors cognitive biases.

      or maybe even heuristics gone bad....

    16. At worst, they might actively harm them.

      Interesting that I've been listening to a series on behavioral economics this week and there've been a few examples of how to use people's cognitive bias against them.

      It can also be helpful for us to know our own biases so we can prevent people from using them against us as well.

    17. This is a book about people. Because design is about peo-ple. We design with and for people. The better we understand people, the more effective we’ll be at our jobs. In particular, this book is about the decision-making part of people. That’s where bias comes in.
    1. If a prominent magazine like The Lancet is publishing such rubbish, who is to say smaller and less well financed magazines aren’t doing the same on a langer scale?

  15. Jul 2020
  16. Jun 2020
    1. Winman, A., Hansson, P., & Juslin, P. (2004). Subjective Probability Intervals: How to Reduce Overconfidence by Interval Evaluation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(6), 1167–1175. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.30.6.1167

  17. May 2020
  18. Apr 2020
    1. Other languages, German for example, are notorious for very long compunds like this and this, that are made up and written as one word directly. Perhaps the way your native language deals with compounds explains your (or other authors') personal preference and sense of "right"?
    1. From the eponymous Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect

      In our work, we ask survey respondents if they are familiar with certain technical concepts from physics, biology, politics, and geography. A fair number claim familiarity with genuine terms like centripetal force and photon. But interestingly, they also claim some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts we asked them about. In fact, the more well versed respondents considered themselves in a general topic, the more familiarity they claimed with the meaningless terms associated with it in the survey.

      An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

      The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence. Here’s a particularly frightful example: Driver’s education courses, particularly those aimed at handling emergency maneuvers, tend to increase, rather than decrease, accident rates. They do so because training people to handle, say, snow and ice leaves them with the lasting impression that they’re permanent experts on the subject. In fact, their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course. And so, months or even decades later, they have confidence but little leftover competence when their wheels begin to spin.

      In these Wild West settings, it’s best not to repeat common misbeliefs at all. Telling people that Barack Obama is not a Muslim fails to change many people’s minds, because they frequently remember everything that was said—except for the crucial qualifier “not.” Rather, to successfully eradicate a misbelief requires not only removing the misbelief, but filling the void left behind (“Obama was baptized in 1988 as a member of the United Church of Christ”). If repeating the misbelief is absolutely necessary, researchers have found it helps to provide clear and repeated warnings that the misbelief is false. I repeat, false.

  19. Feb 2020
    1. people assume that by asking someone a question privately, they are doing everyone else a favor by bothering the fewest amount of people.
    2. We encourage team members to consider making private issues public wherever possible so that we can all learn from the experience, rather than requiring a small group to spend effort translating those learnings in the future.
    1. Wrong solutions can be fixed, but non-existent ones aren’t adjustable at all.
    2. It's important that we keep our focus on action, and don't fall into the trap of analysis paralysis or sticking to a slow, quiet path without risk.