Most of us see what we want to see. If we’re arguing with a spouse, we’re going to start seeing all of their faults. After all, it’s not my fault it’s your fault. Once we’ve labeled someone as, say, selfish, it becomes self-reinforcing thanks to the availability and confirmation bias. Our views become so clouded [...]
Availability Bias
Jason Kottke dug up a Roger Ebert review of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a fictionalized account of a Columbine-like school shooting. Ebert discusses the media’s behavior while reporting these kind of events. Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been [...]
An interesting excerpt from Tim Harford’s review of The Signal and the Noise on Bayes’ theorem and improving prediction: Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century minister and mathematician, nonconformist in both roles. Bayes’ theorem, published posthumously, tells us how to combine our pre-existing view of the world with new information in a rational way. Silver explains Bayes’ [...]
Anthony Gottlieb writing in the New Yorker: Indeed, the guilty secret of psychology and of behavioral economics is that their experiments and surveys are conducted almost entirely with people from Western, industrialized countries, mostly of college age, and very often students of psychology at colleges in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate for evolutionary [...]
When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. Intuitively we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is probably true on an absolute basis, Nassim Taleb argues in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Antifragile, that it is not true on a relative basis. Taleb [...]
A recent article in the WSJ, “Hidden Ways Hotels Court Guests Faster”, focused on how hotels are trying to dazzle guests with first impressions. Jeremy McCarthy, a hotel executive, argues this is why “upon arriving to a luxury hotel, you are often greeted in the lobby by a friendly face, an offer to assist with [...]
According to Dan Gilbert people make two classes of errors when trying to make decisions: errors in odds and errors in value. Gilbert discussed the psychological phenomena leading to errors in odds, including the imaginability error and the optimism bias. We miscalculate the odds of a particular outcome because the imaginability error causes us to [...]
