[24] AI - Bias in Training Materials

[21] AI Nuances

Amplifying dominant perspectives, a feedback loop that ignores all of humanity falling outside the original trainingset, which is impovering itself, while likely also extending the societal inequality that the data represents. Given how such early weaving errors determine the future (see fridges), I don't expect that to change even with more data in the future. The first discrepancy will not be overcome.

Appleton points to the inherent severely limited trainingset and hence perspective that is embedded in LLMs. Most of current human society, of history and future is excluded. This goes back to my take on data and blind faith in using it: [[Data geeft klein deel werkelijkheid slecht weer 20201219122618]] en [[Check data against reality 20201219145507]]

// - This is the critical question - Looking at history, can we see predictive patterns - when it makes sense to stop and take questions of the unknown seriously - rather than steaming ahead into uncharted territory? - We might find that society did not follow science's call - for applying the precautionary principle - because profits were just too great - the profit bias at play - profit overrides safety, health and wellbeing

A similar set of questions might be asked of our political system. At present, the oligopolic nature of our electoral system is heavily biasing our direction as a country.

We're heavily underrepresented on a huge number of axes.

How would we change our voting and representation systems to better represent us?

Machine learning like money laundering for bias

LLMs as a model of reality, but not reality

There are limits to any model. In this case, the training data. What biases are implicitly in that model based on how it was selected and what it contained?

The paragraph goes on to list some biases: race, wealth, and “vast swamps”

• There is a spectrum of climate denialism.
• This article focuses on a group called "dismissives", who are afraid of the change that climate change will bring.
• In essence, their climate denialism is a hidden form of eco anxiety
• They can be reacting fearfully
• It also explores the new strategy of climate delay _ One subject not explored here is cognitive biases
• https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=stopresetgo&max=300&expanded=true&any=cognitive+bias&exactTagSearch=true

• belief perseverance
• definition
  • a cognitive bias in which people encountering evidence that runs counter to their beliefs will, instead of reevaluating what they’ve believed up until now, tend to reject the incompatible evidence

• we describe a conceptual framework
• for understanding adaptive sources of dysfunction
• for identifying and combating “adaptations gone awry.”

• Each of these 4 problems
  • anxiety disorder
  • domestic violence
  • racial prejudice
  • obesity
• reflects the operation of psychological mechanisms
• that were designed through evolution
• to serve important adaptive functions, - but that nevertheless can produce harmful consequences.

• question
  • What do
    • anxiety disorders,
    • domestic violence,
    • racial prejudice, and
    • obesity
• all have in common?
• answer
  • maladaptive cognitive biases!

• cognitive biases may cause dysfunction due to mismatches between:
  • current environments and
  • ancestral environments

• from aggression and international conflict to overpopulation and the destruction of the environment,
• people display a capacity for great selfishness and antisocial behavior.
• Can an evolutionary perspective
• with its inherent focus on the functionality of human behavior
• help explain the occasionally self-destructive and maladaptive side of human nature?

• Relative to the evolutionary past,
• social relationships
• in modernized western societies
• tend to involve
• a much wider variety of relationships,
• along with relatively less immediate connection
• with close, kin-based support networks

• From an evolutionary perspective, - social anxiety is designed primarily
• to help people ensure
• an adequate level of social acceptance and,
• throughout most of human history,
• this meant acceptance
• in a tightly-knit group
• based primarily of biological kin

• Although social anxiety can serve useful functions,
• it can also involve excessive worry, negative affect, and exaggerated avoidance of social situations.
• Understanding the root causes of anxiety-related problems
• is an essential step
• in the development of
• interventions and policies
• to reduce dysfunction.

Examples of artificial intelligence pushing toward pre-existing biases based on training data sets.

!- nature is designed with a natural bias : it favours new emerging species over established ones

NYT and NYT online are well-respected left-center publications. They are known for their factual reporting and variety of topics. The NYT op-eds are known to lean a little more left than NYT news, mostly due to editorial topic selection. This leads me to believe that the intended audience is the average American, particularly those with a left lean. The author writes in relatively simple terms that are easily read by the audience.

Who falls for fake news? Psychological and clinical profiling evidence of fake news consumers

Participants with a schizotypal, paranoid, and histrionic personality were ineffective at detecting fake news. They were also more vulnerable to suffer its negative effects. Specifically, they displayed higher levels of anxiety and committed more cognitive biases based on suggestibility and the Barnum Effect. No significant effects on psychotic symptomatology or affective mood states were observed. Corresponding to these outcomes, two clinical and therapeutic recommendations related to the reduction of the Barnum Effect and the reinterpretation of digital media sensationalism were made. The impact of fake news and possible ways of prevention are discussed.

Fake news and personality disorders

The observed relationship between fake news and levels of schizotypy was consistent with previous scientific evidence on pseudoscientific beliefs and magical ideation (see Bronstein et al., 2019; Escolà-Gascón, Marín, et al., 2021). Following the dual process theory model (e.g., Pennycook & Rand, 2019), when a person does not correctly distinguish between information with scientific arguments and information without scientific grounds it is because they predominantly use cognitive reasoning characterized by intuition (e.g., Dagnall, Drinkwater, et al., 2010; Swami et al., 2014; Dagnall et al., 2017b; Williams et al., 2021).

Concomitantly, intuitive thinking correlates positively with magical beliefs (see Šrol, 2021). Psychopathological classifications include magical beliefs as a dimension of schizotypal personality (e.g., Escolà-Gascón, 2020a). Therefore, it is possible that the high schizotypy scores in this study can be explained from the perspective of dual process theory (Denovan et al., 2018; Denovan et al., 2020; Drinkwater, Dagnall, Denovan, & Williams, 2021). Intuitive thinking could be the moderating variable that explains why participants who scored higher in schizotypy did not effectively detect fake news.

Something similar happened with the subclinical trait of paranoia. This variable scored the highest in both group 1 and group 2 (see Fig. 1). Intuition is also positively related to conspiratorial ideation (see Drinkwater et al., 2020; Gligorić et al., 2021). Similarly, psychopathology tends to classify conspiracy ideation as a frequent belief system in paranoid personality (see Escolà-Gascón, 2022). This is because conspiracy beliefs are based on systematic distrust of the systems that structure society (political system), knowledge (science) and economy (capitalism) (Dagnall et al., 2015; Swami et al., 2014). Likewise, it is known that distrust is the transversal characteristic of paranoid personality (So et al., 2022). Then, in this case the use of intuitive thinking and dual process theory could also justify the obtained paranoia scores. The same is not true for the histrionic personality.

The Barnum Effect

The Barnum Effect consists of accepting as exclusive a verbal description of an individual's personality, when, the description employs contents applicable or generalizable to any profile or personality that one wishes to describe (see Boyce & Geller, 2002; O’Keeffe & Wiseman, 2005). The error of this bias is to assume as exclusive or unique information that is not. This error can occur in other contexts not limited to personality descriptions. Originally, this bias was studied in the field of horoscopes and pseudoscience's (see Matute et al., 2011). Research results suggest that people who do not effectively detect fake news regularly commit the Barnum Effect. So, one way to prevent fake news may be to educate about what the Barnum Effect is and how to avoid it.

Conclusions

The conclusions of this research can be summarized as follows: (1) The evidence obtained proposes that profiles with high scores in schizotypy, paranoia and histrionism are more vulnerable to the negative effects of fake news. In clinical practice, special caution is recommended for patients who meet the symptomatic characteristics of these personality traits.

(2) In psychiatry and clinical psychology, it is proposed to combat fake news by reducing or recoding the Barnum effect, reinterpreting sensationalism in the media and promoting critical thinking in social network users. These suggestions can be applied from intervention programs but can also be implemented as psychoeducational programs for massive users of social networks.

(3) Individuals who do not effectively detect fake news tend to have higher levels of anxiety, both state and trait anxiety. These individuals are also highly suggestible and tend to seek strong emotions. Profiles of this type may inappropriately employ intuitive thinking, which could be the psychological mechanism that.

(4) Positive psychotic symptomatology, affective mood states and substance use (addiction risks) were not affected by fake news. In the field of psychosis, it should be analyzed whether fake news influences negative psychotic symptomatology.

I think the Author may be committing a begging the question fallacy here. Each type of school creates citizens, but the difference is the quality of awareness within the children entering society post education. This statement is circular within the argument.

I would argue that there is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance present on the side introducing these bills. Their lived experience and perception of themselves conflicts with the reality that they are white supremacists and are actively suppressing BIPOC history in an effort to reconcile their perceptions of how they live.

There is a broad, conservative baseline assumption within much of archaeology that technology always proceeds in a linear fashion from primitive simplicity to modern complexity.

Archaeologists and historians need to watch carefully for this cognitive bias.

In this paragraph the author explains how subjects and information learned in schools are poorly retained, adults not being able to answer 'simple' questions. I believe in this paragraph he's exhibiting Confirmation Bias because there are many other factors as to why adults may not retain information such as interest, other ongoing events personally or socially, or simply just the passage of time.

Motivated Reasoning

In broad terms, motivated reasoning theory suggests that reasoning processes (information selection and evaluation, memory encoding, attitude formation, judgment, and decision-making) are influenced by motivations or goals. Motivations are desired end-states that individuals want to achieve.

What is the Illusory Truth Effect?

The illusory truth effect, also known as the illusion of truth, describes how, when we hear the same false information repeated again and again, we often come to believe it is true. Troublingly, this even happens when people should know better—that is, when people initially know that the misinformation is false.

The author of this editorial claims that there is moral value in using the emissions made by a human body over the course of its lifetime in determining if one should be given life. Making a departure from natural selection, and from sexual attraction and ignoring maternal instinct and cultural familial practices and norms. He proposes that the act of being alive can be measured in its impact upon others who will share the future climate them and since the impact is not 0 then there must be an upper limit of "too many". Immorally, he does not include a measure of "too few" and does not make any mention of the problems society has with exponential population decline. Such as Japan currently selling more adult than infant diapers as their population collapses because of too few children. In fact there is no mention of generational replacement or reproduction rate. Just a simplistic measure of a human impact upon the environment with the entirety of positive impact deleted, omitted, ignored completely. There is in fact no moral high ground in maintaining or promoting the idea that human life has no positive value to the earth. Failing to see ones own value or the value of human life as a whole, rejecting the desire to help human kind survive and prosper and reducing human beings to objects with emissions and no positive output potential is morally reprehensible and not a scientifically sound conclusion, given the observable facts. Among them, that every human being alive on the planet today, standing shoulder to shoulder, would not fill the area of los angeles, and setting aside one acre of our best land for every human being on earth would require an area no arger than texas. There is no scientific basis for concluding there are too many people or that the future humans would benefit from lower population. it is a common error, in the media today, where the impact on climate is evaluated out of the context of all other scilences where positive impacts and negative impacts of human life are observable. Such as biological sciences or earth sciences. it is true, that if we lived on a gas giant, where the only element of the planetary ecosystem was the climate, then such an evaluation of our "carbon footprint" would be meaningful. but since we have a planet with oceans dryland and predators and dangerous conditions, it is morrally reprehensible to suggest our population not maximize its potential to survive to see the future so many are trying to protect by literally throwing their babies out with the bathwater. It is impossible to contribute to the well-being of human life in editorial if you do not have a love of human life. My heart goes out to anyone who takes this article seriously. You do not have to limit your fertility to help humankind survive.

Example of an implicit bias against orality out of ignorance

!- insight : progress traps - the dominance of self-interested economic behavior creates a systemic tendency to ignore progress traps, unintended consequences of technology. Profit bias acts to cherry pick explanations that marginalizes rather than addresses progress traps, allowing them to fester and grow to dangerous levels

That is horrifying. You'd think that authors would attempt to remove or filter this kind of material. There are, after all models out there that are trained to find it. It makes me wonder what awful stuff is in the GPT-3 dataset too.

Interesting reason to dismiss the evidence presented by the author.

Historical labor data will be full of bias. AI approaches must correct for bias in training sets, lest we build very sophisticated and intelligent systems that excel at perpetuating the bias they were taught.

https://betterhumans.pub/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cognitive_biases

This article explains the economic market. Creating 528,000 jobs is an outstanding aspect for the American people. But It also needs to explain the bad parts of creating jobs in this situation. Because challenging the rules of economics should not make a better situation, There are also high risks.

This article describes the disadvantages of high-interest rates. Although there are facts and parts that we need to be concerned about, high-interest rates also have advantages. There are more information about advantages about high-interest.

The Bias - Variance Tradeoff!

To help fight cognitive bias, one should actively think about potential failure modes of one's decisions and think about alternative conclusions which aren't part of the findings one might have hoped for. Watching out for these can dramatically help increase solution spaces and be on the watch out for innovative alternate or even better solutions.

Confirmation bias can be detrimental when making solid reflective decisions.

The function of memory served by having written notes is what allows the serious researcher or thinker to have greater confidence in their work, potentially more free from cognitive bias as one idea can be directly compared and contrasted with another by direct juxtaposition.

Here Mills seems to be defining (in 1952) an "intellectual workman" as an academic, but he doesn't go as broad as a more modern "knowledge worker" (2022) which includes those who broadly do thinking in industry as well as in academia. His older phrase also has a more gendered flavor to it that knowledge worker doesn't have now.

Maybe people in the future will see today as the dark ages becuase of the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic So it is biased to call the middle ages as "dark ages" when the level of science during the middle ages cannot heal or prevent people from the infection of plagues such as the "black death".

!- for : race to the bottom !- for : conformity bias - spiraling destructive entrainment

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

In a society consumed with information overload, it is easier for our brains to allow our well evolved cognitive biases to decide not only what to pay attention to, but what to believe.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3641225-mcconnell-throws-shade-on-grahams-proposed-national-abortion-ban/

I've recently run across a few examples of a pattern that should have a name because it would appear to dramatically change the outcomes. I'm going to term it "decisions based on possibilities rather than realities". It's seen frequently in economics and politics and seems to be a form of cognitive bias. People make choices (or votes) about uncertain futures, often when there is a confluence of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and these choices are dramatically different than when they're presented with the actual circumstances in practice.

A recent example was a story about a woman who was virulently pro-life who when presented with a situation required her to switch her position to pro-choice.

Another relates to choices that people want to make about where their children might go to school versus where they actually send them, and the damage this does to public education.

Let's start collecting examples of these quandaries at all levels of making choices in the real world.

What is the relationship to this with the mental exercise of "descending into the particular"?

Does this also potentially cause decision fatigue in cases of voting spaces when constituents are forced to vote for candidates on thousands of axes which they may or may not agree with?

Halstead, I., Lewis, G., & McKay, R. (2021). Opposition to Novel Biotechnologies: Testing An Omission Bias Account. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4ef7m

Health Nerd. (2021, November 1). Ah yes, “randomization” From an RCT of vitamin D that was recently preprinted https://t.co/fHXJDRoIFF [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1455300177829326848

Zhao, W. J., Coady, A., & Bhatia, S. (2021). Computational mechanisms for context-based behavioral interventions: A large-scale analysis. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8cyad

Decision-making in uncertainty | BPS. (n.d.). Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://www.bps.org.uk/events/decision-making-uncertainty

With this comment, the anti-JS position is becoming increasingly untenable. The author earlier suggested C as an alternative. So their contention is that it's easier to write bug-free code in C than it is in JS. This is silly.

C hackers like Fabrice Bellard don't choose C for the things they do because it's easier to write bug-free code in C.

Does this effect have a name? references?

Apparently called the recency bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_bias which may be entangled with availability bias or heuristic.

Are both recency and availability biases the foundations for causing the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias?

!- for : altricial, feral children, mOTHER as the significant OTHER * The bare state of zero culture, zero social context is what each and every neonate starts with in life * The mOTHER is the most significant OTHER that begins the process of socializing and enculturating the neonate into a social system * Altrciality forces human parent into role of strong socialization * Without culture, the neonate born into the world outside the womb can become a feral child * https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/feral-children/ * The state of human ferality can tell us an enormous amount of the perspective of virtually every modern, encultured person - we have a bias towards a cultural perspective because almost noone has seen from a feral perspective * Language is the gateway into the symbolosphere, where enculturated, modern humans spend a significant portion of their lives immersed in this ubiquitous, constructed, symbolic reality

"unchallenged truths" is not really accurate. More like unchallenged assumption.

The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

<small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.

This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work

Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

--

It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.

Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.

I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

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.

And therein lies the great mystery. How is it that with this specific way of knowing, we can still ignore the overwhelming science? It's not just a small minority either, but the majority of the elites. As research from Yale and other leading research institutions on climate communications have discovered, it is not so much a knowledge deficit problem, as it is a sociological / pyschological ingroup/outgroup conformity bias problem.

This would suggest that the scientific community must rapidly pivot and place more resources on studying this important area to find the leverage points for penetrating conformity bias.

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

Two mechanisms behind collective illusions. The first is conformity bias.

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.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/QgkL6IkIEeym7OeN9v9New

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

The Firehose versus the Algorithmic Feed

See related from The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, except with more depth here.

Algorithms are agnostic

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.

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

Of note.

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.

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 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.

An example of the curse of knowledge effect.

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

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.)

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.

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.

Charles Darwin fought confirmation bias by writing down contrary arguments and criticisms and addressing them.

The mere-exposure effect leads us to confuse familiarity with a process with actual skill.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

Is this some kind of attribution bias?

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.

bias

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?

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.

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?

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

'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