Biased? Abso-Fricken-Lutely
August 16, 2021
To be human is to be biased. Call it a DNA thing or blame it on a virus from a pangolin. In the distant past, few people cared about biases. Do you think those homogeneous nation states emerged because some people just wanted to invent the biathlon?
There’s a reasonably good run down of biases in A Handy Guide to Cognitive Biases: Short Cuts. One is able to scan bi8ases by an alphabetical list (a bit of a rarity these days) or by category.
The individual level of biases may give some heartburn; for example, the base rate neglect fallacy. The examples are familiar to some of the people with whom I have worked over the years. These clear thinkers misjudge the probability of an event by ignoring background information. I would use the phrase “ignoring context,” but I defer to the team which aggregated and assembled the online site.
Worth a look. Will most people absorb the info and adjust? Will the mystery of Covid’s origin be resolved in a definitive, verifiable way? Yeah, maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2021
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