[An4ximandros]

 So I found this on Wikipedia after watching a video that references it (the bias, not Wikipedia.) It made me aware of a bias I myself fall for.

 I'd like to know what my “net-kith” thinks of this.

(As a bonus, I found real cyber-quote marks. Jea!)

Ekstra: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[General Battuta]

Welcome to basic psychology dude

[General Battuta]

It's pretty weird that people talk about 'falling for' these things like you could just train yourself out of it. You're not some kind of Pure Brain and you don't 'fall for' heuristic bias any more than you 'fall for' gravity. Them's just the rules, and if you want to get around them, you need specialized equipment - whether a formalized mode of thinking or a prosthesis.

[An4ximandros]

 I was never taught to look for it or that it even exists, which is why it baffled me. This is the kind of thing that should be obligatory to learn as soon as early high school, yet I have not seen it anywhere. In fact, many subjects, which I believe should be an obligation to be taught are thrown aside, not by education systems or governments, by people who constantly express career choices being worthless. Example: how space and orbital research are wasting "brain power".

 Such ignorance of perplexing proportions about crucial elements of being a human, of how society is pulled backwards into the cesspool it spawned from following this line of though, is why society does not move forward, but sideways. Instead of trying to achieve & help achieve potential, people seek to actively destroy it.

 I have a single question about that: Why? Why do we squander our resources, our intelligence, our knowledge, our potential, our world and our lives in such a puerile manner which clearly indicates that we are not an intelligent species but a cluster of children playing with fire? This outrages me to the edge of the Universe.

 ---

 For avoiding the trap, so to speak, I'd like you to show me the ways you do this, Battuta, I'd like to add yours to my arsenal.

[BloodEagle]

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/LessWrong_Wiki

Is this what you're looking for?

[StarSlayer]

Backfire Effect?  Just make sure you keep E-2Cs in the air to sniff em out and your CAP ready to pounce.

[Scotty]

For avoiding the trap, so to speak, I'd like you to show me the ways you do this, Battuta, I'd like to add yours to my arsenal.

The way his post looks to me, there isn't a way to 'avoid the trap' any more than there is a way to 'avoid' gravity.

[General Battuta]

Well, there are ways to work around gravity - lift, thrust, etcetera.

One of the most powerful demonstrations of heuristic bias I've ever seen came in a college decisionmaking class. We were each given a set of data about a race car that had trouble starting on cold mornings. Our racing company could make it big tomorrow if we raced, but if the car broke down, all would be lost and we'd be out of business.

Individually we almost uniformly decided not to race. But when the prof put us in groups, something odd and alchemical happened, and - again, almost universally - each group swapped its decision over to 'race!'

Of course the data wasn't about a race car, it was about the shuttle Challenger. We'd just replicated the decision to launch - partly due to group effects, partly because nobody had noticed a key error in the way the data was presented.

[Scourge of Ages]

I have a single question about that: Why? Why do we squander our resources, our intelligence, our knowledge, our potential, our world and our lives in such a puerile manner which clearly indicates that we are not an intelligent species but a cluster of children playing with fire?

Because it's easier.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Backfire Effect?  Just make sure you keep E-2Cs in the air to sniff em out and your CAP ready to pounce.

Red Storm Rising?

[General Battuta]

Backfire Effect?  Just make sure you keep E-2Cs in the air to sniff em out and your CAP ready to pounce.

Red Storm Rising?

Harpoooon

[Apollo]

You know, I think that confirmation bias is a much bigger problem than it would initially seem. It makes every single convincing-but-flawed argument much harder to discredit. This obviously messes up scientific data, but it also extends to politics, economics, racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice, as well as cruelty in general.

Think about it--the easiest way to hurt someone is to perceive them as a worthless human being who somehow deserves their treatment. Of course, there will be much evidence to the contrary; but a group of people simply enjoys hurting them, they will accept any excuse, no matter how flimsy. If everyone was perfectly objective, they would be forced to realistically look at their actions, and since most people are not cruel in general it would be much harder to target an individual, a race, or any other minority group.

Similarly, many people will only listen to political arguments that suit their particular worldview--one of the main reasons that America is so divided.

This might seem really overblown, but without confirmation bias, people would be far more objective and therefore less susceptible to emotional arguments.

[General Battuta]

Confirmation bias is bad, but it's a maintenance heuristic - it defends ideas already in place. Equally toxic are the means by which we develop prejudice and flawed conclusions: correspondence bias, frequency heuristics, fundamental attribution error.

[StarSlayer]

Backfire Effect?  Just make sure you keep E-2Cs in the air to sniff em out and your CAP ready to pounce.

Red Storm Rising?

Harpoooon

Hey what's that outside the Porthole?

SS-N-19 SHIPWRECK


...Balls

[Aardwolf]

Why not just point him toward your "What is Ubuntu?" dossier? 


Tangent: is there a reason it's referred to there as the Milgram paradigm instead of experiment?

[General Battuta]

Why not just point him toward your "What is Ubuntu?" dossier? 

I hope you realize you're coming off as a total prick. God forbid someone mention the same scientific topic in two different places several years apart.

But yeah anybody who's read through the BP backstory will know a lot of this stuff (which tells me you didn't Mr. Anaximandros :colbert:)

[Legate Damar]

I have a single question about that: Why? Why do we squander our resources, our intelligence, our knowledge, our potential, our world and our lives in such a puerile manner which clearly indicates that we are not an intelligent species but a cluster of children playing with fire?

I believe you just answered your own question.

(lol Terrans)

[NGTM-1R]

Backfire Effect?  Just make sure you keep E-2Cs in the air to sniff em out and your CAP ready to pounce.

Red Storm Rising?

Harpoooon

Hey what's that outside the Porthole?

SS-N-19 SHIPWRECK

...Balls

METHOD: Visual.

God I wish Matrix Games wasn't charging your first-born child for the complete series bundle, I'd be all over that.

[Luis Dias]

I have a single question about that: Why? Why do we squander our resources, our intelligence, our knowledge, our potential, our world and our lives in such a puerile manner which clearly indicates that we are not an intelligent species but a cluster of children playing with fire?

I believe you just answered your own question.

(lol Terrans)

To be fair, An4ximandros may well be suffering from a particular confirmation bias error on his own, one that postulates that we are "children playing with undeserved fire", that "waste" could (or should) be avoided and so on. I notice that this kind of speech is almost memetic in itself. It could well be the case that we aren't as wasteful as we should be - I picked on waste, but I could have picked in any other misanthropic observation in there - there is a very powerful argument being assessed right now in the academia that we aren't as wasteful as we should be. There's another word for "waste", which is "redundancy", something critical in every living organism if you think about it.

And there's a new word around the nets which makes some sense too, "anti-fragility", which is the ability of a system to grow and learn with the mistakes, shocks and accidents, rather than protecting itself from them, taming them, "smoothing" them out and so on.

Confirmation Bias goes all the way, buddy. Even to the thoughts you consider wise.

[redsniper]

Pretty sure there's a distinction between redundancy and waste.