but suppressed through a series of abandonments made in a vain effort to conform with societal expectations.
Our propensity for conformity bias is extremely powerful....the same thing is destroying political discourse. However, an antidote to conformity bias is awe:
https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F17D5SrgBE6g%2F&group=world
if you accept that this is pretty widespread and we we can talk about all the evidence for that the question is then why like how why are we so susceptible to being spectacularly wrong about the 00:04:13 group and then end up like making something true that never was true and it's really like two underlying mechanisms right so the first is this conformity bias which that's not very novel like we know we've known for a 00:04:25 long time that is a species humans are a conforming species
Two mechanisms behind collective illusions. The first is conformity bias.
If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowlyquiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is tellingyou, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in allkinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make andwhich opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people andsituations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a standfor your convictions even when you’re afraid.I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—andyour life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuitioninside. It is the source of your imagination, your confidence, and yourspontaneity
While we have evolved a psychological apparatus that often gives us good "gut feelings" (an actual physical "second brain"), we should listen careful to them, but we should also learn to think about, analyze, and verify these feelings so we don't fall prey to potential cognitive biases.
The student doesn’t have a strong preference for any of these archetypes. Their notes serve a clear purpose that’s often based on a short-term priority (e.g, writing a paper or passing a test), with the goal to “get it done” as simply as possible.
The typical student note taking method of transcribing, using (or often not using at all), and keeping notes is doomed to failure.
Many students make the mistake of not making their own actual notes. By this I don't mean they're not writing information down. In fact many are writing information down, but we can't really call these notes. Notes by definition ought to transform something seen or heard into one's own words. Without the transformation, these students think that they're taking notes, but in reality they're focusing their efforts on being transcriptionists. They're attempting to capture something for later consumption. This is a deadly trap! By only transcribing, they're not taking advantage of transforming information by putting ideas down in their own words to test their understanding. Often worse, even if they do transcribe notes, they don't revisit them. If they do revisit them, they're simply re-reading them and not actively working with them. Only re-reading them will lead to the illusion that they're learning something when in fact they're falling into the mere-exposure effect.
Students who are acting as transcriptionists would be better off simply reading a textbook and taking notes directly from that.
A note that isn't revisited or revised, may as well be a note not taken. If we were to consider a spectrum of useful, valuable, and worthwhile notes, these notes would be at the lowest end of the spectrum.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02346-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02346-4
Oddly this article doesn't cover academia.edu but includes ResearchGate which has a content-sharing partnership with the publisher SpringerNature.
Matthews, D. (2021). Drowning in the literature? These smart software tools can help. Nature, 597(7874), 141–142. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02346-4
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
See related from The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, except with more depth here.
Algorithms in themselves are neither good nor bad. And they can be implemented even where you don’t have any technology to implement them. That is to say, you can run an algorithm on paper, and people have been doing this for many centuries. It can be an effective way of solving problems. So the “crisis moment” comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That’s when the crisis starts.
As we know them now, algorithms—and [[machine learning]] in general—do well when confined to the domains in which they started. They come apart when dealing with unbounded domains.
The way technologies like fMRI are applied is aproduct of our brainbound orientation; it has not seemed odd or unusual toexamine the individual brain on its own, unconnected to others.
In part because of modalities of studying the brain using methods like fMRI where the images are of an individual's head, we focus too much and too exclusively on single brains bound to individuals rather than on brains working in concert.
Greater flexibilities in tools and methods should help do studies of humans working in concert.
Link this to the anecdote:
I recall a radiology test within a medical school setting in which students were asked to diagnose an x-ray of a human patient's skull. Most either guessed small hairline fractures in the skull or that there was nothing wrong with the patient.
Can you diagnose the patient?
Almost all the students failed the question, and worse felt like idiots when the answer was revealed: the patient must be dead because the spinal column and the rest of the body are not attached. Compare:
Harp, N., Langbehn, A. T., Larsen, J., Niedenthal, P., & Neta, M. (2022). Facial coverings differentially alter valence judgments of emotional expressions. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5a9fd
ReconfigBehSci. (2021, December 28). RT @gianlucac1: Excuse me....am i wrong or you didnt control for previous infection of the vaxxed? If that is the case how can you "isolat… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1475813442988777478
Bacharach, J., Schreiber, M., Schreiber, M., Schreiber, M., Schreiber, M., Adler-Bell, S., Adler-Bell, S., Beacock, I., Beacock, I., Rosenfeld, S., Rosenfeld, S., Subramanian, S., & Subramanian, S. (2022, March 15). Why Is David Leonhardt So Happy? The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/165729/david-leonhardt-happy-review-new-york-times-morning-newsletter
algorithmic embedding and enhancement of biases that reinforceracism, sexism, and structural inequality
Of note.
computers might therefore easily outperform humans at facial recognition and do so in a much less biased way than humans. And at this point, government agencies will be morally obliged to use facial recognition software since it will make fewer mistakes than humans do.
Banning it now because it isn't as good as humans leaves little room for a time when the technology is better than humans. A time when the algorithm's calculations are less biased than human perception and interpretation. So we need rigorous methodologies for testing and documenting algorithmic machine models as well as psychological studies to know when the boundary of machine-better-than-human is crossed.
In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible.
Although the model was driven "towards compounds such as the nerve agent VX", it found VX but also many other known chemical warfare agents and many new molecules...that looked equally plausible."
AI is the tool. The parameters by which it is set up makes something "good" or "bad".
Sinclair, Alyssa H., Morgan Taylor, Freyja Brandel-Tanis, Audra Davidson, Aroon T. Chande, Lavanya Rishishwar, Clio Maria Andris, et al. ‘Counteracting COVID-19 Risk Misestimation with an Interactive Website’. PsyArXiv, 9 February 2022. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/v8tdf.
The study’s authors suggest that this discrepancy may emerge fromdifferences in boys’ and girls’ experience: boys are more likely to play withspatially oriented toys and video games, they note, and may become morecomfortable making spatial gestures as a result. Another study, this oneconducted with four-year-olds, reported that children who were encouraged togesture got better at rotating mental objects, another task that draws heavily onspatial-thinking skills. Girls in this experiment were especially likely to benefitfrom being prompted to gesture.
The gender-based disparity of spatial thinking skills between boys and girls may result from the fact that at an early age boys are more likely to play with spatially oriented toys and video games. Encouraging girls to do more spatial gesturing at an earlier age can dramatically close this spatial thinking gap.
Newton arranged an experiment in which one person — a “tapper” — was asked to tap out the melody of a popular song, while another person — the “listener” — was asked to identify it. The tappers assumed that their listeners would correctly identify about 50% of their melodies; they were amazed to learn that the listeners only got about one out of 40 songs correct. To the tappers, their melodies sounded perfectly clear and obvious, but the listeners heard no music, no instrumentation in their heads — only the muffled noise of a finger tapping on a table.
An example of the curse of knowledge effect.
The velocity of social sharing, the power of recommendation algorithms, the scale of social networks, and the accessibility of media manipulation technology has created an environment where pseudo events, half-truths, and outright fabrications thrive.
As it has been stated by Daniel Kahneman, we all are "cognitively lazy." This a very telling statement that helps to reveal the different reasonings of why we are in a world full of "half-truths" but, deeper than that, why we all continue to accept these half-truths. A lot of times we do not want to take the necessary time it takes to evaluate information instead of just accepting things to be true.
Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 10). Lots of people dismissing links between COVID-19 and all-cause diabetes. An association that’s been shown in multiple studies- whether this increase is due to more diabetes or SARS2 precipitating diabetic keto-acidosis allowing these to be diagnosed is not known. A brief look👇 [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1480546865812840450
Read for Understanding
Ahrens goes through a variety of research on teaching and learning as they relate to active reading, escaping cognitive biases, creating understanding, progressive summarization, elaboration, revision, etc. as a means of showing and summarizing how these all dovetail nicely into a fruitful long term practice of using a slip box as a note taking method. This makes the zettelkasten not only a great conversation partner but an active teaching and learning partner as well. (Though he doesn't mention the first part in this chapter or make this last part explicit.)
Reading, especially rereading, caneasily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading isespecially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: Themoment we become familiar with something, we start believing wealso understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more(Bornstein 1989).
The mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.
Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.
The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanelystarts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about,is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant.
Many study and writing guides suggest to start ones' writing or research work with a topic or hypothesis. This is a recipe for disaster to succumb to confirmation bias as one is more likely to search out for confirming evidence rather than counter arguments. Better to start with interesting topic and collect ideas from there which can be pitted against each other.
“I had [...]during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever apublished fact, a new observation or thought came across me, whichwas opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of itwithout fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such factsand thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory thanfavorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raisedagainst my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted toanswer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)
Charles Darwin fought confirmation bias by writing down contrary arguments and criticisms and addressing them.
psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe wehave become good at it – completely independent of our actualperformance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confusefamiliarity with skill.
The mere-exposure effect leads us to confuse familiarity with a process with actual skill.
Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept
isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.
Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.
The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.
This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.
Just followyour interest and always take the path that promises the mostinsight.
What specific factors does one evaluate for determining what particular paths will provide actual (measurable) insight?
Most people have a personal gut reaction about which directions to go in heuristically, but can these heuristics be broken down explicitly to enable better evaluating them? How can they be used to avoid cognitive biases?
How does COVID-19 misinformation compare with other health topics? (2022, January 19). https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-misinformation-was-entirely-predictable-experts-say
PaedsHaemDoc. (2022, January 9). Had the misfortune (via @fatemperor) to come across Dr Paul Alexander -apparently credentialed yet in single blog post demonstrates perfectly either a disconnect from rational thought or deliberate misinformation spreading of the #masspsychosis of the anti-Vax crew let’s examine https://t.co/Ctd49cb1qK [Tweet]. @dr_barrett. https://twitter.com/dr_barrett/status/1479986071832248322
a bias toward bad news
Is there a more technical term for the bias towards bad news?
Deepti Gurdasani. (2022, January 30). Have tried to now visually illustrate an earlier thread I wrote about why prevalence estimates based on comparisons of “any symptom” between infected cases, and matched controls will yield underestimates for long COVID. I’ve done a toy example below here, to show this 🧵 [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1487578265187405828
An over-reliance on numbers often leads to bias and discrimination.
By their nature, numbers can create an air of objectivity which doesn't really exist and may be hidden by the cultural context one is working within. Be careful not to create an over-reliance on numbers. Particularly in social and political situations this reliance on numbers and related statistics can create dramatically increased bias and discrimination. Numbers may create a part of the picture, but what is being left out or not measured? Do the numbers you have with respect to your area really tell the whole story?
Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems.
Tech solutionism is the presumption that technology (usually by itself) can fix a variety of social, cultural, and structural problems.
It fits into a category of problem that when one's tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.
Many tech solutionism problems are likely ill-defined to begin with. Many are also incredibly complex and difficult which also tends to encourage bikeshedding, which is unlikely to lead us to appropriate solutions.
Argument quality and fallacies. (n.d.). HackMD. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://hackmd.io/@scibehC19vax/argumentquality
Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlierversion of ourselves;
It is likely a good broad generality that from a historical perspective, those looking at people from the past do so by considering them simply an earlier version of ourselves.
This sort of isocultural cognitive bias is something to be very cognizant of particularly in cases without extensive context as it is likely to cause massive context collapse.
many people accept the scientific consensus on, say, vaccine effectiveness not because they value peer-reviewed research but because they are impressed by people in lab coats who use big words
the fact that many Bitcoin enthusiasts say bizarre things does not, in itself, mean that cryptocurrencies are a bad idea
Is this some kind of attribution bias?
In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.
The writer is purposely making these characters seem way different while ignoring that the movie was made in a completely different era to relate more to today's problems rather than problems in 1961. The speaker fails to recognize that the movie is going to have a different look because it is a new producer.
When we simply guess as to whathumans in other times and places might be up to, we almostinvariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky– in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.
Definitely worth keeping in mind, even for my own work. Providing an evidential structure for claims will be paramount.
Is there a well-named cognitive bias for the human tendency to see everything as nails when one has a hammer in their hand?
‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that theycouldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’
Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)
Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?
We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.
Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spendsmuch time watching the news, let alone who knows much about thehistory of the twentieth century.
Are they suffering from potential availability heuristic (cognitive bias) here? Are they encouraging it in us? Just because we see violence on the news every day doesn't mean it's ubiquitous.
Apparently we'll need real evidence here to provide actual indications.
Does Steven Pinker provide archaeological evidence in his book? What are the per capita rates of violence and/or death over time?
In a nutshell, then, there was never a time when humans uniformly lived in small, simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, and a time when they started to switch to agriculture- thus inevitably switching to a sedentary, hierarchical, and more complex life style. This is not because the correct trajectory is a different one, but because there was never a linear trajectory to begin with.
Is there a reason or cognitive bias we've got that would tend to make us think that there's a teleological outcome in these cases?
Why should it seem like there would be a foregone conclusion to all of human life or history? Why couldn't/shouldn't it just keep evolving from its current context to the next
Replicating scientific results is tough—But essential. (2021). Nature, 600(7889), 359–360. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03736-4
Tentori, K., Pighin, S., Giovanazzi, G., Grignolio, A., Timberlake, B., & Ferro, A. (2021). Default change nudges Covid-19 vaccine uptake: A randomized controlled trial. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9bsjg
A sharp rise in reported active volcanoes immediately post-WW II was followed by another steep increase in the early 1950s that has no obvious relationship to historic events.
'No obvious relationship to historic events' is blatantly inaccurate here. The US military was active in the Pacific for the entirety of this time frame reestablishing the power in the Pacific US colonies. It naturally would follow that volcanic activity would be reported at higher rates as military vessels were combing the area.
Sean Phelan. (2021, November 26). Striking how some media coverage is assuming (without caveats) that the Belgian case brought the new variant “from” Egypt or Turkey.There’s no chance they picked it up after returning to Belgium of course. How could that happen..we only have a 7-day average of 17,000 cases a day [Tweet]. @seanphelan8. https://twitter.com/seanphelan8/status/1464252432033136659
Johnston, M. (2021). What Lies Beneath: Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy. Emergency Medicine News, 43(10), 7. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.EEM.0000795760.41732.33
I know a number of my subs and viewers are in India and I've noticed on Twitter and on Abhijit Chavda's channel that there's quite a bit of controversy about the way Indian History is taught to Indian students. That interests me a lot, but what I'm PARTICULARLY interested in is, how World History surveys throughout the world cover world history. If part of this involves continuing the narratives introduced by colonizers, like the Aryan Invasion myth, that's relevant to my question.
I've seen/heard several articles about Narendra Modi and the BJP rewriting history in India over the past several years.
Examples include:
Caulfield, T. (2021, October 18). The Golden Age of Junk Science Is Killing Us. Men’s Health. https://www.menshealth.com/health/a37910261/how-junk-science-and-misinformation-hurt-us/
The Metascience Movement Needs to be More Self-Critical. (2021, October 31). Absolutely Maybe. https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2021/10/31/the-metascience-movement-needs-to-be-more-self-critical/
What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.
One of the flaws of Mark Zuckerberg's spectrum disorder is that he either has no sense of shame or his confirmation bias and loss aversion biases are incredibly large.
Pagel, C., & Yates, C. A. (2021). Tackling the pandemic with (biased) data. Science, 374(6566), 403–404. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi6602
There are many other more subtle biases of the evolved human brain—its tendency to focus on the thing that changes rather than the thing that’s constant,
Is there a name for this bias?
02:18 So we gave people information and as a result it caused polarization, it didn’t cause 02:23 people to come together.
At the beginning of this episode, Sandy Hudson tells Nora Loreto about a podcast on NPR, Invisibilia.
The episodes that I listened to were about an anti-news news website in Stockton, California. How news has shifted and changed.
The Invisibilia episode is entitled, The Chaos Machine: An Endless Hole.
I ended up following this rabbit hole all the way to The View from Somewhere podcast episode featuring a discussion of Hallin’s spheres. Truly fascinating!
Sutton, J. (2018). Health Communication Trolls and Bots Versus Public Health Agencies’ Trusted Voices. American Journal of Public Health, 108(10), 1281–1282. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304661
Yee, A. (n.d.). COVID’s Outsize Impact on Asian Americans Is Being Ignored. Scientific American. Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covids-outsize-impact-on-asian-americans-is-being-ignored/
Ciccione, L., Sablé-Meyer, M., & Dehaene, S. (2021). Analyzing the misperception of exponential growth in graphs. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dah3x
Mixing science and art to make the truth more interesting than lies. (n.d.). Retrieved September 28, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/mixing-science-and-art-to-make-the-truth-more-interesting-than-lies-100221?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nyIy_TX4wk
An excellent video. Going to have to watch it a few more times to absorb more.
Rutjens, B. T., van der Linden, S., van der Lee, R., & Zarzeczna, N. (2021). A group processes approach to antiscience beliefs and endorsement of “alternative facts.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(4), 513–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211009708
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:
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).
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?
Pilditch, T. (2021). Why scientific evidence is no longer enough in public debate [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/98v2n
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?
How to trash confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine: Brexit edition—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (n.d.). Retrieved August 10, 2021, from https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/how-to-trash-confidence-in-a-covid-19-vaccine-brexit-edition/#.YQwD9u6LazM.twitter
Marc Lipsitch. (2021, August 5). @nataliexdean @CT_Bergstrom N serology at end of follow up could solve problem of bias from unobserved infections https://t.co/Dwwxh77zP2 [Tweet]. @mlipsitch. https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1423107107558084608
Sun, Q., Lu, J., Zhang, H., & Liu, Y. (2021). Social Distance Reduces the Biases of Overweighting Small Probabilities and Underweighting Large Probabilities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(8), 1309–1324. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220969051
Hosseinmardi, H., Ghasemian, A., Clauset, A., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D. M., & Watts, D. J. (2021). Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(32), e2101967118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101967118
Sulik, J., & McKay, R. (2021). Studying science denial with a complex problem-solving task [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/huxm7
Aizpurua, A., Migueles, M., & Aranberri, A. (2021). Prospective Memory and Positivity Bias in the COVID-19 Health Crisis: The Effects of Aging. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666977. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666977
Bressan, P. (2021). Strangers look sicker (with implications in times of COVID-19). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x4unv
Taber, J. M., Thompson, C. A., Sidney, P. G., O’Brien, A., & Updegraff, J. (2021). Experimental Tests of How Hypothetical Monetary Lottery Incentives Influence Vaccine-Hesitant U.S. Adults’ Intentions to Vaccinate. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ux73h
Dr. Felix Schönbrodt on Twitter. (2020). Twitter. Retrieved 4 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/nicebread303/status/1325829196883636231
u/dawnlxh. (2021). Reviewing peer review: does the process need to change, and how?. r/BehSciAsk. Reddit
ReconfigBehSci on Twitter. (2020). Twitter. Retrieved 27 February 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1339855911796543488
Holmes, N. P. (2021). I critiqued my past papers on social media—Here’s what I learnt. Nature, 595(7867), 333–333. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01879-y
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
Palminteri, S. (2021). Choice-confirmation bias and gradual perseveration in human reinforcement learning [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dpqj6
Moore, D. A., Backus, M., & Little, A. T. (2021). Constraints on Thinking Cause Overprecision [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/evcx2
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.
Thoughts written down can be retrieved as-is. This conquers hindsight bias which makes you change your mind after the fact, pretending you knew it all along.
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.
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?
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?
adult volunteers 18 years
How did they mitigate self-report bias?
Richard McElreath 🍜 on Twitter: “Everything is selection effects, always has been. From page 162 of my book: Https://t.co/tQaeF2LXkW” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2021, from https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath/status/1396040993175126018
Laukkonen, R., Kaveladze, B., Protzko, J., Tangen, J. M., von Hippel, B., & Schooler, J. (2021). The ring of truth: Irrelevant insights make worldviews seem true [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zq3vd
Baghal, T. A., Wenz, A., Sloan, L., & Jessop, C. (2021). Linking Twitter and survey data: Asymmetry in quantity and its impact. EPJ Data Science, 10(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00286-7
Crocker-Buque, T., & Mounier-Jack, S. (2018). Vaccination in England: A review of why business as usual is not enough to maintain coverage. BMC Public Health, 18(1), 1351. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-6228-5
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
. 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
Gugerty, L., Shreeves, M., & Dumessa, N. (2021). Biased belief updating in causal reasoning about COVID-19. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bfw76
Agarwal, A. (2021). The Accidental Checkmate: Understanding the Intent behind sharing Misinformation on Social Media. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kwu58
Salvador, C. E., Berg, M. K., Yu, Q., San Martin, A., & Kitayama, S. (2020). Relational Mobility Predicts Faster Spread of COVID-19: A 39-Country Study. Psychological Science, 31(10), 1236–1244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620958118
Dunn, E. W., Chen, L., Proulx, J. D. E., Ehrlinger, J., & Savalei, V. (2021). Can Researchers’ Personal Characteristics Shape Their Statistical Inferences? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(6), 969–984. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220950522
Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:
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.
Young, K. S., Purves, K. L., Huebel, C., Davies, M., Thompson, K. N., Bristow, S., Krebs, G., Danese, A., Hirsch, C., Parsons, C. E., Vassos, E., Adey, B., Bright, S., Hegemann, L., Lee, Y. T., Kalsi, G., Monssen, D., Mundy, J., Peel, A., … Breen, G. (2021). Depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sf7b6
Niemeyer, H., Aert, R. C. M. van, Schmid, S., Uelsmann, D., Knaevelsrud, C., & Schulte-Herbrueggen, O. (2020). Publication Bias in Meta-Analyses of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Interventions. Meta-Psychology, 4. https://doi.org/10.15626/MP.2018.884
Maarten van Smeden on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 4 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/MaartenvSmeden/status/1328093246829064192
Rohrer, J. M., Schmukle, S., & McElreath, R. (2021). The Only Thing That Can Stop Bad Causal Inference Is Good Causal Inference. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/mz5jx
COVID, One Year Ago on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 1 May 2021, from https://twitter.com/covidoneyearago/status/1383888066671046657
Pleskac, T. J., Kyung, E., Chapman, G. B., & Urminsky, O. (2021, April 23). Single- or double-blind review? A field study of system preference, reliability, bias, and validity. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/q2tkw
Yang, K.-C., Pierri, F., Hui, P.-M., Axelrod, D., Torres-Lugo, C., Bryden, J., & Menczer, F. (2020). The COVID-19 Infodemic: Twitter versus Facebook. ArXiv:2012.09353 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09353
Scheel, Anne M., Mitchell R. M. J. Schijen, and Daniël Lakens. ‘An Excess of Positive Results: Comparing the Standard Psychology Literature With Registered Reports’. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 4, no. 2 (1 April 2021): 25152459211007468. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459211007467.
Nabavi, N., & Dobson, J. (2021, April 21). Covid-19 new variants—known unknowns. The BMJ Opinion. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/04/21/covid-19-new-variants-known-unknowns/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork
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.
Białek, M., & Grossmann, I. (2021). Social bias insights concern judgments rather than real-world decisions. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/y3h7n
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".
Oh, and it focuses on Russia and Eastern Europe, with cities like Olonets, Torun, Solovski, Kobuleti, Skopje etc in the Easy difficulty setting.
Maybe use more cities from South/West Europe, too?
I would be really proud to show it off it was "my baby", but as a player, it's incredibly boring.
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.
Qian, M., Chou, S.-Y., & Lai, E. K. (2020). Confirmatory bias in health decisions: Evidence from the MMR-autism controversy. Journal of Health Economics, 70, 102284. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2019.102284
Giubilini, A., Caviola, L., Maslen, H., Douglas, T., Nussberger, A.-M., Faber, N., Vanderslott, S., Loving, S., Harrison, M., & Savulescu, J. (2019). Nudging Immunity: The Case for Vaccinating Children in School and Day Care by Default. HEC Forum, 31(4), 325–344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-019-09383-7
Bish, A., Yardley, L., Nicoll, A., & Michie, S. (2011). Factors associated with uptake of vaccination against pandemic influenza: A systematic review. Vaccine, 29(38), 6472–6484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.06.107
Bonder, Taly, Ido Erev, and Elliot Ludvig. ‘On the Impact of Germs and Demons’. PsyArXiv, 10 March 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vscz4.
Coenen, A., & Gureckis, T. (2021). The distorting effects of deciding to stop sampling information. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tbrea
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
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.
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.
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.
Cailin O’Connor. (2020, November 10). Using agent-based methods we show how even modest contact between disciplines can allow better methods to spread. This is because outsiders can award academic credit to those using good methods, leading to their uptake. 5 [Tweet]. @cailinmeister. https://twitter.com/cailinmeister/status/1326229762533060608
Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2021, from https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2010-22979-001.pdf?auth_token=a25fd4b7f008a50b15fd7b0f1fdb222fc38373f4
ReconfigBehSci. (2020, November 9). Session 2: The policy interface followed with a really helpful presentation by Lindsey Pike, from Bristol, and then panel discussion with Mirjam Jenny (Robert Koch Insitute), Paulina Lang (UK Cabinet Office), Rachel McCloy (Reading Uni.), and Rene van Bavel (European Commission) [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1325795286065815552
indi.ca. (2020, July 20). COVID Underdogs: Mongolia. Medium. https://indi.ca/covid-underdogs-mongolia-3b0c162427c2
Wang, X., Sirianni, A. D., Tang, S., Zheng, Z., & Fu, F. (2020). Public Discourse and Social Network Echo Chambers Driven by Socio-Cognitive Biases. Physical Review X, 10(4), 041042. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.041042
Chande, A., Lee, S., Harris, M., Nguyen, Q., Beckett, S. J., Hilley, T., Andris, C., & Weitz, J. S. (2020). Real-time, interactive website for US-county-level COVID-19 event risk assessment. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(12), 1313–1319. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01000-9
UX is now "user exploitation."
The dark arts of dark patterns and exploiting cognitive biases.
Konstantinos, A. (2021). Tips on countering conspiracy theories and misinformaton. CommsFlyer.
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'
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
“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.
Safra, L., Chevallier, C., & Sijilmassi, A. (2021). Poverty and Threat Reactivity. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fp35r
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
Lakens, D. (2019, November 18). The Value of Preregistration for Psychological Science: A Conceptual Analysis. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jbh4w
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.
Group, B. M. J. P. (2021). Update to living systematic review on prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis of covid-19. BMJ, 372, n236. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n236
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."
Artificial Intelligence Is Now Used to Predict Crime.
Artificial Intelligence
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
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.
Lakens. D. Etz.. A. J. (2020) Too True to be Bad: When Sets of Studies With Significant and Nonsignificant Findings Are Probably True. Pubmed. Retrieved from: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29276574/
How Algorithmic Bias Hurts People With Disabilities
Soderberg, C. K., Errington, T., Schiavone, S. R., Bottesini, J. G., Thorn, F. S., Vazire, S., Esterling, K. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2020). Research Quality of Registered Reports Compared to the Traditional Publishing Model. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/7x9vy
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?
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.
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)
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".
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.
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).
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.
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?
Rubin, M. (2020, October 20). Does preregistration improve the credibility of research findings?. https://doi.org/10.20982/tqmp.16.4.p376
Martin, G. P., Sperrin, M., & Sotgiu, G. (2020). Performance of Prediction Models for Covid-19: The Caudine Forks of the External Validation. European Respiratory Journal. https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.03728-2020
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.
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.
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/).
IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. ‘COVID-19 and the Labor Market’. Accessed 6 October 2020. https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13664/.
Daniël Lakens on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://twitter.com/lakens/status/1308115862247952386
PhD Diaries is on Discord 💬 on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 22, 2020, from https://twitter.com/thoughtsofaphd/status/1307356715868921858
Harris, A. J. L., & Hahn, U. (2011). Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note. Psychological Review, 118(1), 135–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020997
ReconfigBehSci on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 21, 2020, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1307289623526285315
Fragkaki, I., Maciejewski, D. F., Weijman, E., Feltes, J., Cima, M. (2020). Human Responses to Covid-19: The Role of Optimism Bias, Perceived Severity, and Anxiety. 10.31234/osf.io/w4k9m
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.
Facts v feelings: How to stop our emotions misleading us. (2020, September 10). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/10/facts-v-feelings-how-to-stop-emotions-misleading-us
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.
Kasy, M. (2020). How to run an adaptive field experiment. Retrieved from https://maxkasy.github.io/home/files/slides/adaptive_field_slides_kasy.pdf
Kahn, R., Kennedy-Shaffer, L., Grad, Y. H., Robins, J. M., & Lipsitch, M. (n.d.). Potential Biases Arising from Epidemic Dynamics in Observational Seroprotection Studies. American Journal of Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwaa188
Melnikoff, D. E., & Strohminger, N. (2020). The automatic influence of advocacy on lawyers and novices. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00943-3
loss aversion. We are way more scared of losing what we have than excited about getting something new.
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?
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.
“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.
"These little cuties are 50% Triangles, 50% Squares, and 100% slightly shapist.
Sadly, I wished they'd have used circles as I see the triangles and am perhaps primed to think that they're KKK hoods.
A fascinating viewpoint on social media, journalism, and information. There are some great implied questions for web designers hiding in here.
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?
Carroll, P. (2020, August 20). The Cognitive Biases Behind Society’s Response to COVID-19 | Patrick Carroll. https://fee.org/articles/the-cognitive-biases-behind-societys-response-to-covid-19/
Mario Elia on Twitter: “While I commend them for this work, a few things jump out at me right away looking at the data tables. The sample of the patients was heavily skewed towards a few demographics. 1/” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved July 11, 2020, from https://twitter.com/supermarioelia/status/1280709931235184641
ReconfigBehSci {@SciBeh} (2020) this kind of piece behavioural scientists need to reject! A shallow understanding of the bias literature in an even shallower application to the pandemic- the idea that believing lockdowns brought down infection rates is an example of the "post hoc fallacy" is bizarre 1/3. Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1298939778340184065
Fife, D., Lung, M., Sullivan, N., & Young, C. (2020). When Values Collide: Why Scientists Argue About Open Science and How to Move Forward [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/q9d28
Ballard, Timothy, Ashley Luckman, and Emmanouil Konstantinidis. ‘How Meaningful Are Parameter Estimates from Models of Inter-Temporal Choice?’, 21 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/mvk67.
Haelle, Tara. ‘Keep an Eye out for Lead-Time Bias with COVID-19 Deaths’. Association of Health Care Journalists (blog), 21 August 2020. https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2020/08/keep-an-eye-out-for-lead-time-bias-with-covid-19-deaths/.
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.
Monforte, A. d’Arminio, Tavelli, A., Bai, F., Marchetti, G., & Cozzi-Lepri, A. (2020). Effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 disease: A done and dusted deal? International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 99, 75–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2020.07.056
Erev, I., Plonsky, O., & Roth, Y. (2020). Complacency, panic, and the value of gentle rule enforcement in addressing pandemics. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00939-z
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.
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.
The framing effect, which is the bias the above examples exploit, is in my opinion the most dangerous bias in the world.
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?
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.
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!
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...
we aren’t gullible so much as efficient. We tend to believe things that are easy for our minds to process.
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.
Immune neglect describes another failure of affective fore-casting, specifically around predicting our ability to cope with adverse outcomes.