Name That Cognitive Bias!

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that is why I kept bumping this thread ! I would like to see more too.

Merle

Your view is problematic for many reasons.

You have to be selective as to what you wish to investigate, being rational doesn't mean you have the capacity to explore everything. There is no such thing as absolute truth either and there is always more analysis that can be done.

I'm a big truth seeker. If there is a problem I want to know why. However the phrase “the truth will set you free” doesn’t always stack up. It depends on the scope. Sometimes it can be counterproductive to you aims, including your rational aims, to always attempt to be rational. People with some anxiety and depression can actually be quite realistic about their social standing compared to others. However knowing this doesn’t help them because it ends up being self defeating. It would only be good if you are extraordinarily good at separating concerns, but this would require unusual neurophysiology. Sense of self is only part of you brain. The “self” is different than the body, and different from the animal and evolutional motors. They can contradict each other, if you could even put them on the same playing field. No matter how rational you think you are you can’t stop being an animal. Irrational cognition is not necessarily irrational behaviour; it is just not to be taken literally word for word or in a self context.

That is what I’m saying cognitive bias is built into human nature and inescapable. It goes beyond these examples. The sense of self is a cognitive bias with respect to inherent/non conscious processes and nature as a whole.

A good example is with elections. In the west we bang on about our rights, and freedoms. But how much of an informed judgment can we really make? We are more or less reliant on different media outlets feeding us information. We complain that politicians lie, but they wouldn’t lie if people didn’t want to believe them.

The perception of crime is higher than actual crime figures, and there is lot of it in the news. But it wouldn’t get show if there wasn’t an insatiable desire for it.

I often hear people saying that they are really rational and logical, and therefore will arrive at the right answer quicker than other people. These people cannot be as rational as they think; they merely hold the delusion that they are more rational. What they may be is a tad more practical and decisive than some people. But if you are being logical in the relative sense you would know that you can’t always come to a definitive answer. You have to make a judgment at some point, and some of that will be based on your personality.

sinsboldy & A-markz, I might have a new one ready in several days. Thanks for the interest.

0 equals true,

Correctly selecting what to investigate is a rational decision. And it’s not required that one explores everything, or attains a proof. As long as one acquires solid enough evidence they are fine.

The rest of your post seems to be divided into two points:
1) Truth is not always best
2) A human aspiring rationalist is chasing an unrealistic dream because they are ultimately an irrational animal

To answer 1: I don’t expect for truth to set me free, nor do I expect truth to hurt me. I expect truth to be a necessary prerequisite in helping me achieve my goals and to form new ones. If a person values their “social standing”, then it’s best for them to find out about their low status if they wish to change it.

To answer 2: regardless of the fact that humans are animals, they can still discover the axioms of decision theory, probability theory, etc., and figure out what the optimal way to act should be, given the situation and preferences. And having animalistic preferences does not prevent one from being extremely rational, as all preferences are arbitrary. What matters is if the decision-making process was optimal or not.

Humans may not be able to rid themselves of their cognitive biases, but we should still be able to identify them and suppress them when they arise to our conscious attention. This might also one day allow us to theorize what a mind that is free of these biases might look like.

Name That Cognitive Bias! 2
(I'm posting this in the same thread just in case people are subscribed to it.)
List of Cognitive Biases

Judith: What do you think the future has in store for us?
Glen: The future? I think it’s gonna be wild. I think we’ll all have jetpacks and there’ll be flying cars and stuff. Hover boards, smaller cell phones, bigger televisions - lots of cool stuff. We might even be able to watch movies in 3D. That’s a good question. What about you? What do you think it’ll be like?
Judith: Um… you call that wild? That sounds a tad conservative to me.
Glen: What do you mean, conservative? Give me your version, then, miss wild speculation.
Judith: Okay. I think we’ll be able to travel to other planets, at least the ones in our solar system. I also believe that we will develop a means to construct and manufacture goods from extremely raw materials - molecules, atoms - through molecular nanotechnology. And the one with the most impact: we most likely will be able to upload our minds onto computers that have enough hardware to simulate the brain. We’ll be living inside computers!
Glen: Living… inside computers?
Judith: Yeah.
Glen: That’s science fiction. Ain’t gonna happen.
Judith: How is that not gonna happen? Supercomputers already have petabytes and petaFLOPS. Merely 15 years ago they were in the hundreds of gigaFLOPS. The human brain might require more than one or two petaFLOPS to be completely simulated, but in another 15 or 20 years don’t you think that will happen?
Glen: I don’t know. Simulate the human brain?
Judith: You do know that mice brains have been simulated, right?
Glen: Mice brains.
Judith: You also know that human brains are not that much more complex than mice brains, right? And I hope you know that there isn’t a fundamental difference between mice and human brains.
Glen: So… you think we’ll live inside computers?
Judith: It’s definitely possible. It’ll happen sooner or later.
Glen: You read too much science fiction.
Judith: You know you’re a fool, right?

Judith seems to think that Glen is a fool. Well… he is. And that’s because he’s flaunting a cognitive bias. Name that cognitive bias!

Is no one up for the task?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_o ... ic_insight for Glen is my guess, he assumes that he knows Judith better than she knows him, maybe?

I have a cognitive bias in that I assume cognition is better than the alternative!

No, really though I generally agree that rationality is always better than reaction-based decision making. No one has ever died from an overdose of knowledge.

justmax, while he could be faintly flaunting that cognitive bias as well, there is another cognitive bias that is more strongly directed towards what Judith is talking about.
Hint: what exactly is Glen rejecting? Judith's premises, reasoning, or conclusion?

I have the same bias.

Glen is rejecting the conclusion, although he seems to not question the premises.

Premises and reasoning are the prime locations where errors in logic lie though. What if the premise of the brain being equivalent to the consciousness is assumed to be false though, such that the computer program emulation of the brain processes are correct enough to have the same algorithms, but is insufficient to actually have the consciousness of the person uploaded. A facsimile at best, type of thing.

Now, all the cognitive bias things based upon the sequences of sentences that you have listed, they show more than just one person's bias. However, if two people share the same bias in regard to the same subject matter, then do they tend to view themselves as biased or do they tend to view themselves as objective?

There's still no cognition involved in the example except in terms of the two-way interaction. No mis-valuing of evidence, in fact no evidence at all. A cognitive bias is demonstrated when evidence is misinterpreted and action taken. What the example presents is two people who don't like each other gossiping about fantasies.

This is getting into the whole 'Identity issue', which I've seen a countless number of times. Is consciousness in the brain, heart, kidneys, small intestine, etc. Split-brain patients are one reason to heavily lean towards 'brain'.

I am aware of this, but more than any other bias, there is definitely one that is sticking out like a sore thumb, and it happens to be Glen's.

I don't know how many people consider themselves objective, but if two people share a bias, they will almost certainly be blind to it and assume that they're right, though not necessarily objective.

So yes, Glen is rejecting the conclusion. I hope that makes detecting the cognitive bias easier.

Surely cognitive biases can be displayed in conversations. When people talk they express their beliefs in certain biased fashions. My characters do present verbal evidence, and it is being (mis)interpreted and shown by the quality of the other person's response.

And my characters do not not like each other. They're just angsty teenagers. Well, Judith might not be angsty.
And they're not gossiping about fantasies; they're talking about a likely future.

peterd, name that cognitive bias!

Gosh, a challenge:

I started looking things up, but so far all of the following are demonstrated in the example

Bandwagon effect

Base rate fallacy

Bias blind spot

Choice supportive bias

Confirmation bias

Distinction bias - well, perhaps not

Expectation bias

Focussing effects

Irrational escalation

Mere exposure effect

Neglect of probability

and by then my attention was flickering to other things. Sorry

Okay, I am aware that more than one cognitive bias is in effect. It's hard to write a dialogue with human characters where there is a complete absence of all cognitive biases, except one. But... any existing cognitive biases are effectively below a threshold relative to the apparent existence of the one I surrounded the dialogue around.

Also, Bias Blind Spot is not in effect at all in my dialogue, as it requires that somebody points out a cognitive bias in someone else, and that person denying their pointed-out cognitive bias.

Hmmm... Yes, well. I know I'm cognitively deficient. That's why I linked the buggers back to the definitions I was considering. In my somewhat constrained world evidence is the only thing I've got and the evidence is that people aren't often clear thinkers.

But to continue the analysis, one can see:
Subjective validation

False consensus effect
Reverse ingroup bias
Justification

and the final putdown looks (to me) a lot like the sore loser exerting social power by belittling his opponent - is there a name for that one?

I honestly thought that this one would be easier to guess than my first one.

It is a bias under the 'biases in probability and belief'. Glen is rejecting the conclusion because it sounds... absurd, far-fetched.

Isn't that last line (in the dialogue) a smashing put-down along the lines of "Well you don't agree with me so nothing you say is worthy of consideration!!"?