Rant: About cognitive bias?

[WALKYRIA]

I'm particularly interested about cognitive biais, it seems to be everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

heck it out, there are so many cognitive bias.
I'm curious to know if there is a science/ discipline studying them( philosophy maybe? neurophilosophy? neuropsych?) and the application of those inbuilt human anomalies.... Seriously, what are the ways in which cognitive bias can be used/is used: to control, unite, emote, impress someone, fall in love, make someone fall in love etc... isn't it all about cognitive bias?

And what about debiasing? How do we do that?

 

[Intolerable]

Simplified as a survivalist need to know. Time is of the essence to come to a logical conclusion of what was.

Like in optics the eye sees a circle where there is a series of dots arranged into a circle. The same is true for logical conclusions. They can often seem irrational given just a little more information.

When new information comes in it is often viewed with scrutiny for the same reason. New is also strange and sometimes that can rub someone the wrong way.

To avoid this you have to proactively seek more information thus holding off on judgement of what was. Clearly not many people are inclined to do this. Hell, even INTP types are prone to choosing for the sake of having chosen. Getting things out of the way in that sense. Without surprise that's usually where we go wrong.

 

[Hadoblado]

Interesting that debiasing is a footnote while manipulation is the meat and potatoes.

Cognitive psychology is what you're looking for Machiavelli.

Try this if you ever find yourself a saddle for my high-horse.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

The assumption that people manipulate or act machiavellian is a cognitive bias unto itself.

Most of the time most assumptions that have to do with control-from-shadows and the supposed power games outside of the individual scope of perception are grossly misconstrued or exaggerated versions of what's actually going on.

Speaking more 'gamish'. When there's a fog of war, the player will use the min-max algorithm to simulate what their opponent is doing. Effectively, the player will assume the maximally worst case that could happen in order to prepare for it.

Similarly when dealing with unknowns, as soon as there's a sense of fear or insecurity that leads to antagonism and perceived hostility, all the unknowns will tend to be filled with 'worst cases and highest possible dangers' which is the brain's way of narrating a war story or preparing against an impending attack that never comes.

 

[Tannhauser]

Behavioral/cognitive psychology (the only type of psychology worth studying).

 

[Hadoblado]

The assumption that people manipulate or act machiavellian is a cognitive bias unto itself.

Most of the time most assumptions that have to do with control-from-shadows and the supposed power games outside of the individual scope of perception are grossly misconstrued or exaggerated versions of what's actually going on.

Speaking more 'gamish'. When there's a fog of war, the player will use the min-max algorithm to simulate what their opponent is doing. Effectively, the player will assume the maximally worst case that could happen in order to prepare for it.

Similarly when dealing with unknowns, as soon as there's a sense of fear or insecurity that leads to antagonism and perceived hostility, all the unknowns will tend to be filled with 'worst cases and highest possible dangers' which is the brain's way of narrating a war story or preparing against an impending attack that never comes.

I'm particularly interested about cognitive biais, it seems to be everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

heck it out, there are so many cognitive bias.
I'm curious to know if there is a science/ discipline studying them( philosophy maybe? neurophilosophy? neuropsych?) and the application of those inbuilt human anomalies.... Seriously, what are the ways in which cognitive bias can be used/is used: to control, unite, emote, impress someone, fall in love, make someone fall in love etc... isn't it all about cognitive bias?

And what about debiasing? How do we do that?

Manipulation is fleshed out into six separate interactions, debiasing is left as an open question. OP has spent more time thinking about the former than the latter. Maybe you're biased in assuming me biased?

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

OP has spent more time thinking about the former than the latter. Maybe you're biased in assuming me biased?

Err, is this question for me? I was agreeing with what you said and expanding on how OP even mentions manipulation when it's usually a mental bias to consider it as an option.

 

[Hadoblado]

Oh, apparently my ego is super-centric. Ignore me.

 

[WALKYRIA]

It seem to me that cognitive bias are everywhere; and contribute to a large chunk of our societal beliefs... some examples and their power.

Black people are dumb(power: average)
Muslims are terrorists/extremists(power: weak)
White people are boring(power: weak to average)
Beautiful people are more reliable and overalll better as humans(average)
Celebrities/rich people/high status people are more attractive.
People are more attractive when they are in a group setting( cheerleader effect...strong)
Talkative people are more interesting( average to strong)
Women are generally dumb( weak to strong)
Believing what the media says/ Believing what the school/Parents teaches/tells you( strong)
Calm people are wiser(strong)
Wearing red is more attractive.(strong)

Based on the knowledge of those, isn't it actually easy to maximise personal value( superficial value atleast?)?? And superficial value is important in manyways, job interviews perhaps,..Etc

Behavioral/cognitive psychology (the only type of psychology worth studying).

Lol, it makes actually sense... What do you know about tha discipline? Why do you prefer it?

 

[kora]

I wish everything u wrote was not drenched in weird PUA obsession.

edit: Does that count as a cognitive bias?

 

[WALKYRIA]

edit: Does that count as a cognitive bias?

Of course it does.

 

[kora]

Ah. But wait. On my part or yours ?

 

[QuickTwist]

Try this

Interesting site. Seems to be riddled with intellectual types.

Cognitive bias is only not found in the most healthiest of minds IMO. Also, smart people have less biases than dumb ones. There's a free tip on getting smarter granted you can follow through.

Speaking for myself, I imagine when I say and sometimes do something to or for someone else to put myself in their shoes as I would be doing it for myself and try to think about how that would make me feel. I do this a lot, meaning a lot. Its an overcorrection I have made for remembering myself being insensitive at times, remembering when people have been cruel to me and remembering how other have been cruel to people I know/knew. Its easiest to do this while I am calm and I know I am nowhere near perfect at this, especially when someone displays lack of caring.

 

[Hadoblado]

Cognitive bias is found in every mind. No exceptions. It's intrinsic in the way we perceive. Even in the case an exceptionally enlightened individual were able to identify and accurately understand each one they possess, they could never know that this was the case, and they'll likely still experience them even if they perfectly counterbalance them.

I've read a few studies that indicate that intelligence and bias have no correlation (not even a negative one). Intelligent people are better able to understand and argue an issue, but this does not convert well into objectivity. Even though it's intuitive to think smart people would hold less bias, since you'd think reasoning would be important, I've not seen this conclusion evidenced.

As a tip for 'getting smarter', it may still be a good one. It depends on what you're getting smarter for. Some people just want the selling point of a high IQ, reducing your bias will do little to help you here. But if you're interested in having accurate perception, having a better understanding and being 'less wrong', it's a great start. I value an unbiased perception far and above a high processing power.

 

[QuickTwist]

I can get on board with the fact everyone has confirmation bias, seems true enough fmpov as well.

I will say that it can get tricky finding biases that smart(er) people may have if not for when it seems they are pushing an agenda and that's something that funny enough could be dismissed as cognitive bias whether it is a correct hunch or not.

I would just like to add that when you say being intelligent and having bias is no correlation is that its hard to measure bias when it is an elaborate one and at a point you have to have an open enough mind to understand that there is even a problem there (coming in from rl circumstances) and identify the correct problem. More often than not knowing the correct problem is really half the battle because if you're smart enough to correctly identify the problem then coming up with the solution is often a trivial task. But I do get your point that just because someone has a bias does not mean they are not smart.

I guess it is my own cognitive bias weighing in that smart people often do not hold such biases, or maybe its that the dumb people I know cling so tightly to their biases, that it blurs the line. I'm not sure. I have grown up with some very close minded people with some negative effects so it is likely my reinforced cognitive bias that open mindedness is good and close mindedness is bad.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Cognitive bias is only not found in the most healthiest of minds IMO. Also, smart people have less biases than dumb ones. There's a free tip on getting smarter granted you can follow through.

Nah. It's everywhere. It's just that healthy people have more effective and failsafe ways of debunking and straightening said biases.

I've read a few studies that indicate that intelligence and bias have no correlation (not even a negative one). Intelligent people are better able to understand and argue an issue, but this does not convert well into objectivity. Even though it's intuitive to think smart people would hold less bias, since you'd think reasoning would be important, I've not seen this conclusion evidenced.

That's actually in line with my experience of real world...and scary too. Intelligence, which is simply an optimisation algorithm doesn't care if it's objective or unbiased, it just optimises the hell out of things. Something to the effect of the popularly mentioned stamp collecting AI which goes on to destroy the earth and transform its matter into stamps. (Which for many purposes is a ridiculous example and fear-mongering / part of other agenda, but is a nice example right now)

 

[Haim]

Most people are not geniuses, they can not ask questions without assumptions, a genius know how to ask good questions that doesn't include the (wrong) answer in it, Einstein didn't assume anything he looked for what is not right.
People have well feelings, that include the logical and smart people right here, this works on everyone, smart people might need more complicated ways to get manipulated, but still work like a charm, "hey here are some numbers(numbers!) from some (super biased)statistic data to prove my point".
Many people here have the problem of using logical tools for illogical problems, this create a "I am logical and unbiased person" biased thinking, not knowing you are biased is a huge huge biased, and you are biased, even if you are Spock.

 

[QuickTwist]

Most people are not geniuses, they can not ask questions without assumptions, a genius know how to ask good questions that doesn't include the (wrong) answer in it, Einstein didn't assume anything he looked for what is not right.
People have well feelings, that include the logical and smart people right here, this works on everyone, smart people might need more complicated ways to get manipulated, but still work like a charm, "hey here are some numbers(numbers!) from some (super biased)statistic data to prove my point".
Many people here have the problem of using logical tools for illogical problems, this create a "I am logical and unbiased person" biased thinking, not knowing you are biased is a huge huge biased, and you are biased, even if you are Spock.

Spock is half human so it doesn't count... I'm kidding ofc.

I still think there has to be some correlation to reasoning and not having, or at least having corrected, biases. Biases are clumsy and inefficient - hard to get to the root of the subjective objectivity with them. If I had to guess I'd say the people that are constantly adjusting their biases with new information on things that they had previously been bias towards are generally better at reasoning for the simple fact that it takes some pretty good reasoning to determine that biases do more harm than good and that solving the problem of eliminating biases can only help one reason through things.

 

[Matt3737]

Most people are not geniuses, they can not ask questions without assumptions, a genius know how to ask good questions that doesn't include the (wrong) answer in it, Einstein didn't assume anything he looked for what is not right.
People have well feelings, that include the logical and smart people right here, this works on everyone, smart people might need more complicated ways to get manipulated, but still work like a charm, "hey here are some numbers(numbers!) from some (super biased)statistic data to prove my point".
Many people here have the problem of using logical tools for illogical problems, this create a "I am logical and unbiased person" biased thinking, not knowing you are biased is a huge huge biased, and you are biased, even if you are Spock.

Every human has to make assumptions to even begin to reason including Einstein.

In his discussion with Albert Einstein, Karl Popper argued against determinism:

The main topic of our conversation was indeterminism. I tried to persuade him to give up his determinism, which amounted to the view that the world was a four-dimensional Parmenidean block universe in which change was a human illusion, or very nearly so. (He agreed that this had been his view, and while discussing it I called him "Parmenides".) I argued that if men, or other organisms, could experience change and genuine succession in time, then this was real. It could not be explained away by a theory of the successive rising into our consciousness of time slices which in some sense coexist; for this kind of "rising into consciousness" would have precisely the same character as that succession of changes which the theory tries to explain away. I also brought in the somewhat obvious biological arguments: that the evolution of life, and the way organisms behave, especially higher animals, cannot really be understood on the basis of any theory which interprets time as if it were something like another (anisotropic) space coordinate. After all, we do not experience space coordinates. And this is because they are simply nonexistent: we must beware of hypostatizing them; they are constructions which are almost wholly arbitrary. Why should we then experience the time coordinate—to be sure, the one appropriate to our inertial system—not only as real but also as absolute, that is, as unalterable and independent of anything we can do (except changing our state of motion)?

The reality of time and change seemed to me the crux of realism. (I still so regard it, and it has been so regarded by some idealistic opponents of realism, such as Schrödinger and Gödel.)

When I visited Einstein, Schilpp's Einstein volume in The Library of Living Philosophers had just been published; this volume contained a now famous contribution of Gödel's which employed, against the reality of time and change, arguments from Einstein's two relativity theories. Einstein had come out in that volume strongly in favour of realism. And he clearly disagreed with Gödel's idealism: he suggested in his reply that Gödel's solutions of the cosmological equations might have "to be excluded on physical grounds".

Now I tried to present to Einstein-Parmenides as strongly as I could my conviction that a clear stand must be made against any idealistic view of time. And I also tried to show that, though the idealistic view was compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, a clear stand should be made in favour of an "open" universe—one in which the future was in no sense contained in the past or the present, even though they do impose severe restrictions on it. I argued that we should not be swayed by our theories to give up realism (for which the strongest arguments were based on common sense), though I think that he was ready to admit, as I was, that we might be forced one day to give it up if very powerful arguments (of Gödel's type, say) were to be brought against it. I therefore argued that with regard to time, and also to indeterminism (that is, the incompleteness of physics), the situation was precisely similar to the situation with regard to realism. Appealing to his own way of expressing things in theological terms, I said: if God had wanted to put everything into the world from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But He seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.
— Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography​

Because of the homogeneity of the spacetime and the mutual twisting of our family of timelike geodesics, it is more or less inevitable that the Gödel spacetime should have closed timelike curves (CTC's). Indeed, there are CTCs through every event in the Gödel spacetime. This causal anomaly seems to have been regarded as the whole point of the model by Gödel himself, who was apparently striving to prove, and arguably succeeded in proving, that Einstein's equations of spacetime are not consistent with what we intuitively understand time to be (i.e. that it passes and the past no longer exists, the position philosophers call presentism, whereas Gödel seems to have been arguing for something more like the philosophy of eternalism), much as he, conversely, succeeded with his Incompleteness Theorems in showing that intuitive mathematical concepts could not be completely described by formal mathematical systems of proof. See the book A World Without Time (ISBN 0465092942).

Einstein was aware of Gödel's solution and commented in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist that if you can have a series of causally-connected events in which "the series is closed in itself" (in other words, a closed timelike curve), then this suggests that there is no good physical way to define whether a given event in the series happened "earlier" or "later" than another event in the series:

In that case the distinction "earlier-later" is abandoned for world-points which lie far apart in a cosmological sense, and those paradoxes, regarding the direction of the causal connection, arise, of which Mr. Gödel has spoken.
​

Such cosmological solutions of the gravitation-equations (with not vanishing A-constant) have been found by Mr. Gödel. It will be interesting to weigh whether these are not to be excluded on physical grounds.​

We all make assumptions in order to reason. The best we can do is adapt, reassess, modify, reformulate, and continue to take in new information.
​

 

[Urakro]

Cognitive bias is found in every mind. No exceptions. It's intrinsic in the way we perceive. Even in the case an exceptionally enlightened individual were able to identify and accurately understand each one they possess, they could never know that this was the case, and they'll likely still experience them even if they perfectly counterbalance them.

I've read a few studies that indicate that intelligence and bias have no correlation (not even a negative one). Intelligent people are better able to understand and argue an issue, but this does not convert well into objectivity. Even though it's intuitive to think smart people would hold less bias, since you'd think reasoning would be important, I've not seen this conclusion evidenced.

As a tip for 'getting smarter', it may still be a good one. It depends on what you're getting smarter for. Some people just want the selling point of a high IQ, reducing your bias will do little to help you here. But if you're interested in having accurate perception, having a better understanding and being 'less wrong', it's a great start. I value an unbiased perception far and above a high processing power.

Nah. It's everywhere. It's just that healthy people have more effective and failsafe ways of debunking and straightening said biases.

That's actually in line with my experience of real world...and scary too. Intelligence, which is simply an optimisation algorithm doesn't care if it's objective or unbiased, it just optimises the hell out of things. Something to the effect of the popularly mentioned stamp collecting AI which goes on to destroy the earth and transform its matter into stamps. (Which for many purposes is a ridiculous example and fear-mongering / part of other agenda, but is a nice example right now)

Those are some good thoughts, right along with what I was having a hard time finding the words for.

About the optimization, dominating-stamp-AI-machine thing, just want to add that it could be more about using the brain more efficiently, or utilizing the least amount of energy type of thing. Cognitive biases are more of a strength-saving feature, where alternatively it would have to process a lot harder to constantly rebuild new connections and adjust paradigms and perspectives. Which when getting to true logic in reality, you'd need a lot of power and a really good CPU water-cooling system, not to mention the vulnerability to serious glitches in the ego and emotion engine.

Cognitive biases are probably there because they served us well for normal functioning, and even though not the most 'rational' they have a good rating to get us through and work in a pinch.

But when writing an important argument or proposal, the cognitive biases have to go (Be corrected). Science, research, math, etc, critical thinking has it's applications.

 

[Hadoblado]

Yeah, biases are either adaptive, or a byproduct of an adaptive trait (learning).

Even in science, it could be argued that the biased scientist does better for themselves than the unbiased. They're more likely to get the results they're looking for, the ones that makes headlines and boost a career. In the short term anyway. It doesn't make you a good scientist by any means, but you might be more likely to get your foot in the door if you consistently find the results you're looking for.