Taking note of any serious ideas which are contrary to our own conceptions is important because this may lead us to new realizations about concretes which in turn leads to new frontiers of knowledge.

One must find a way to push through potential cognitive dissonance to compare ideas and sharpen them over time.

Having a good catch phrase for guidance can become a useless trap if it becomes repeated so frequently that it loses meaning. Guiding principles need to be revisited, actively worked on, and ensconced into daily activities and culture.

examples: - Google and "don't be evil" - Pixar (and many others) and "story is king" (cross Reference Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.) - Pixar and "trust the process" (ibid) #

Indexing the world into a commonplace book, zettelkasten, or other means can create new perspectives on the world in which we live. It thereby helps to prevent the sorts of cognitive bias which we might otherwise fall trap to.

This example of Homes indexing crime gives him a dramatically different perspective on crime in the countryside to Watson who only sees the beauty in the story of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches."

Poker chip example really well explained at the Reality Distortion Kit at the stanford lecture

How to protect against these sorts of outcomes? Relation to identity and cognitive biases?

Depending on what level a writer stipulates their usage, they may come to some drastically bad conclusions. One should watch out for these sorts of biases.

Compare with the results of accepting certain axioms within mathematics and how that changes/shifts one's framework of truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

• key observation
  • we often vote for "strong men" who are not in the business of public service but are oriented towards conquering and dominating due to a cognitive bias developed from tens of thousands of years of evolution.
  • in ancient times, a physically strong man to lead us often increased our chances of survival.
  • This is no longer true today, but that cognitive bias is still with us because evolution takes a long time.
  • Hence, this cognitive bias to select strong men is maladaptive today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

• 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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:

An example of the curse of knowledge effect.

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.

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?

Is there a more technical term for the bias towards bad news?

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.

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.

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

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.

Is there a name for this bias?

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

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?

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

The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

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

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

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

Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

Some core ideas of critical race theory:

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

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

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

Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

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

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

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

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

What are you afraid of?

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?

Sulik, J., & McKay, R. (2021). Studying science denial with a complex problem-solving task [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/huxm7

Bressan, P. (2021). Strangers look sicker (with implications in times of COVID-19). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x4unv

Agarwal, A. (2021). The Accidental Checkmate: Understanding the Intent behind sharing Misinformation on Social Media. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kwu58

Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

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

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

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

The dark arts of dark patterns and exploiting cognitive biases.

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

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."

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

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

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

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.

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.

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/

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

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.

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?

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...

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

or maybe even heuristics gone bad....

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

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

Harp, N., Dodd, M. D., & Neta, M. (2020). Emotional working memory load selectively increases negativity bias [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jnesc

Williams, A. E. (2020, April 20). The Global Response to COVID-19 as an Example of a One-Sided Problem Definition in the Absence of General Collective Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/emgxc

Teovanovic, P., Lukic, P., Zupan, Z., Lazić, A., Ninković, M., & Zezelj, I. (2020, May 20). Irrational beliefs differentially predict adherence to guidelines and pseudoscientific practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gefhn

Kamorowski, J., de Ruiter, C., Schreuder, M., Ask, K., & Jelicic, M. (2020, April 16). Forensic Mental Health Practitioners’ Use of Structured Risk Assessment Instruments, Views About Bias in Risk Evaluations, and Strategies to Counteract It. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/te5c2

From the eponymous Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger effect

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

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias