I find the treatment of psychology on HN to be perplexing. On one hand, there have been attacks on psychology as a field [1] due to legitimate concerns related to replication. On the other hand, blog posts such as this come up every few days that take the same results for granted and frame them in everyday terms.
I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology? Or does the treatment also depend on the presentation, e.g. in the form of a scientific publication vs. a brain hacking tips or cheatsheet.
I actually get the impression that most of the articles that are "liked" by HN are somewhat grass roots. Take this one. It is a "hacker" that is spending time to try to improve biases held.
It is somewhat ironic, to me, that I am basically accusing us of having an anti-intellectual bend. However, it is not unique to psychology. There is a similar slant against "academic" computer science.
> I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology?
Yes. This isn't a monolithic hive mind or fundamentalist religion. There are people from all walks of life with different ideas here. You will find trends, but no unanimity.
There is a favor towards Kahneman's work, either out of interest or approval. It hits all the HN high notes (oriented around decision-making, thinking, personal effectiveness, reason) while additionally being backed by Kahneman's more-than-typically-rigorous models.
On replication, this same criticism has recently been directed at physics, chemistry and biology, among others. [1]
Psychology, with view to its practical (non-research) use has not helped me, but at least three people I know say they benefitted from cognitive behavioural therapy. Perhaps in the future, medicine and science will subordinate it to the same role of philosophy to better explain human behaviour and thinking as the latter did in less techical approaches for centuries. [2]
And yes, I am somewhat skeptical of said blog posts that cite some "new study" claiming to explain something only to be refuted or contradicted months later.
As someone who is probably guilty of ignoring most psychology articles due to doubts about psychology research, I think this article is an interesting step forward for popular psychology. This categorization of biases is something I can use both for myself and when I try to help others. This article is unlikely to lead to debates about research methods and statistics because it's very high level and presents few opinions.
Incidentally, I noticed these cognitive biases probably apply equally well to strong AI (artificial intelligence). No matter how powerful an AI is, it's always going to lack some information, it will take time to calculate things, it will lack experience, and it will not have enough memory capacity to remember every detail. Strong AI will probably have to learn to use cognitive biases.
Notice how this particular article is devoted to skepticism generally, rather than promoting a particular hypothesis.
It should be heartening that most science topics here are treated with this kind of Feynmanian attitude, always willing to accept contradictory evidence, always reluctant to draw strong conclusions.
It's possible to be interested in a field's subject matter while being critical of the methods.
For example, US space research at NASA may be awash in politics, crippled by a lack of long-term vision, and overly focused on military applications, but space is still cool.
The workings of the mind and the results of cognitive biases are fascinating, but that doesn't excuse poor statistics and a lack of rigor.
> I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology?
Yes and no. Yes, we are all different people. No, there is not much sense to grouping us based on a single dimension. That is an excellent example of what Vonnegut called a granfalloon.
This is cool, although the real trick is knowing when and how to employ methods that will mitigate the problems caused by cognitive bias to accurately identify and resolve conflicts and facilitate clear decision-making. This is the purpose of courts, the purpose of peer review, the purpose of debate.
Generally, it is not necessary to understand every single type of cognitive bias in a nuanced way to mitigate the problems. Indeed, sometimes cognitive biases overlap to the extent that trying to mitigate one, you'll wind up affected by another. What's important is that your behavior and social rules be oriented towards uncovering truth through dialectic methods.
Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, recently posted a terrific video on the the issue viewpoint diversity on college campuses-- specifically, the lack of it. Problems of confirmation bias are exaggerated, especially in social sciences, when there's a lack of viewpoint diversity on campus. When everyone likes the conclusions put forth by a paper, no one is motivated to find the flaws. Thus the flaws are not found, the flawed papers get cited by other papers, and you wind up with a knowledge base that is increasingly divorced from reality. Whether you know the name for that bias or not is less relevant than actually addressing the structural problems.
If you are interested in learning how your brain makes decisions, where biases and error come from, and a whole lot more, I highly recommend this book by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman:
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp...
Interestingly, he won his nobel prize in the field of economics, but he's a psychologist, not an economist. His research was so influential that it changed business strategies (esp. around how meetings are held) forever.
I can't say enough good things about Thinking Fast and Slow. Go read it.
I posted this article in reply to another comment in this thread, but I think many will find it interesting and useful. It's a good jumping off point into his research and why it's important.
I would agree. For me, the most important thing to know is that there are biases that could be impacting me and to always leave room for a) a competing viewpoint can be sincerely held and possibly correct over the viewpoint I am convinced of, and b) to always ask myself if there is a self interested reason I want the belief I hold to be true.
Many biases cannot be overcome even with knowing about them... but accepting that it's possible I'm wrong and that the crazy guy on the other side is both sincere in his competing belief and possibly correct, allows me to evolve and learn and ultimately get along with more people.
I have some strongly held beliefs and opinions...But I try to keep my mind open and without considering cognitive biases, you are going to be more close minded than you should be in most cases.
>Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, recently posted a terrific video on the the issue viewpoint diversity on college campuses-- specifically, the lack of it.
As someone who just finished reading his book, I must ask for clarification. Is he talking about lack of diversity in the student body, or in the faculty body?
I know he has published work showing a bias against conservatives in his field...
This is the purpose of courts, the purpose of peer review, the purpose of debate.
Ideally. But keep in mind: not for everyone, and it would be in the interests of those primarily concerned with power and manipulation to convince those concerned with truth and the greater good that this is the case.
"The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it, but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world."
So wonderfully said. I wonder what biases AI will develop in its models
I once heard that our senses primarily function as filters. I.e. our eyes only see by filtering out all sorts of other visual stimuli, our ears hear by filtering out other noises, etc...
That means that we are only capturing a "tiny sliver" of whats actually happening around us.
If we only keep this small detail in mind we can be sure that lack of evidence is never proof of anything and that any evidence we do see can only be used to find the most probable of competing hypotheses and its diagnosticity should always be considered. (i.e. fever might mean you are sick but has no diagnostic value to what particular ailment you have since its consistent with other possibilities.)
Same goes for using bounce rate as a metric for web analysis...its diagnostic value on its own doesnt tell us much, but with other context, like time on site and conversion goal of site (i.e. a phone call conversion will register as a bounce if they dont navihate elsewhere.) It can tell us a lot.
Likely a lot of the same biases... Look at the categorization, these are things any general system of intelligence is going to have to do at some level. Only a system with infinite computational power can afford to be without bias.
This is an artifact of evolution - mental shortcuts enabled faster decision making, and species that got to the conclusion fastest survived. Of course, there is an error rate, but as long as it was small, the faster decision makers won.
Logic is simply a way to systematically eliminate these errors in wetware (and ultimately hardware).
My kid loves the Imperial March too for some reason. I thought I was a bad parent. Strange we came to the same conclusion. There must be something to this. /s (n=2)
This was my first reaction as well. Paternity leave is not what I'd call an opportunity for deep thoughts and pondering. He must have had a very good baby!
In politics, I find gambling is the best way to resolve disputes among friends stemming from cognitive bias. Put a bit of money on various results and someone will be right and someone will be wrong.
How can any list of cognitive biases be complete without the end-of-history illusion [1]. Given the number of young people I see with tattoos it would have to be the most common illusion.
I'm fascinated by the graph Manoogian created. Does anyone know what specific tools were used to create it, or which could be used to create similar ontologies?
To summarize biases further, in one word: Incompetence.
Lab results confirming cognitive biases come from testing small groups of students (up to 200). Among other things, it means: (1) respondents with similar background, so we can't generalize (2) respondents don't care about outcomes, (3) tests are synthetic. Plus publication bias and other standard issues.
These results are themselves a sort of confirmation bias.
Mistakes in real life happen when we don't know what we're doing. If a person can learn, he'll discover systematic mistakes. But that comes with domain experience, not cognitive science.
Granted this might be useful but I believe the ability to recognize these biases and fallacies can only be improved by experience. You can read or memorize what each bias is but you might not be that quick to recognize it in a discussion, it takes practice not just a cheat sheet[0].
First line of article: I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases[0] whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can’t recall the name or details.
I don't think there's anything the article author mentioned that argues against improvement through experience, critical thinking, and sensitivity to the limitations of the human mind.
This is excellent. It could be improved by adding a very short summary of each bias. This would help the reader to drill-down to a specific bias of interest.
The article starts off by complaining about the wikipedia article, but as I was reading his post I kept thinking "But this is exactly what was in the Wikipedia infographic!" .... aaand then I realize the infographic is a side-effect of his blog post!
Thanks for putting this together! As someone interested in cognitive biases, I wonder: how many of these effects have survived the recent replication crisis intact?
I learned a long time ago already not to trust my memory. For example I'm trying to find a piece of text in a book, or a specific story in a newspaper my memory might give me a clue, which would be something like "it's on that page next to that "red thing" or "there's a story on the opposite page about xyz". I never trust this anymore it's a wild goose chase.
A good thing to think about how biased your brain is, is to think of that time when you were witnessing that wonderful sunset and you decided to take a photo. Later you look at the photo and it doesn't look at all like you remember. Why? Because it's your brain playing tricks on you. You have a built in image filter in your brain that adjusts the image and your memory of it whereas the camera sees it "objectively."
Once you become aware of all the cognitive biases you just get tired of listening to people talk (about anything really), when it's full of logical holes and anecdotes. In fact it becomes painful especially when listening to some electoral candidate / politician talk about stuff that might actually matter. sigh
>We notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in ourselves. Yes, before you see this entire article as a list of quirks that compromise how other people think, realize that you are also subject to these biases.
I found this section was written very pourly.
/s ;]
This exact title/link has been posted a number of times (>5) in the past 1-2 months [1].
I'd be interested to know which cognitive bias is at work when the instance of the post today gets 480+ points -- but no instances of this post (same title, same url) in the past 1 month garnered more than 26 pts.
I am both new to HN, and legitimately curious. Perhaps the content of the site was improved dramatically?
Great article, but what on earth is the point of the huge wheel chart?
Its pretty, but I'm not sure what conclusions it helps me draw, other than sorting sources of bias by group/subgroup in a difficult to read manner.
The point is to put it on the wall of your office so that when people come in they will understand that you are an expert on human biases and be on notice not to try anything funny.
One has to make a distinction between dialectic situations, where you are trying to get at the truth, vs. rhetorical situations, where the attempt is to convince others (often not the person you are speaking with) of the truth.
For example, trotting out cognitive biases in a rhetorical situation is often very effective, particularly when your opponent is operating in a dialectic mindset.
Useful resource to review. There is always time to think about how we think. I know from experience that always underestimate by 30% the time it takes to do things - being it gardening or coding. I measure it to find out. Cognitive bias is something that we all need to be aware of. Just give yourself a 30sec "CB Check" before any decision and see what happens.
[+] [-] thaw13579|9 years ago|reply
I wonder, are there different groups of HN readers with different attitudes towards psychology? Or does the treatment also depend on the presentation, e.g. in the form of a scientific publication vs. a brain hacking tips or cheatsheet.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643978
[+] [-] taeric|9 years ago|reply
It is somewhat ironic, to me, that I am basically accusing us of having an anti-intellectual bend. However, it is not unique to psychology. There is a similar slant against "academic" computer science.
[+] [-] colordrops|9 years ago|reply
Yes. This isn't a monolithic hive mind or fundamentalist religion. There are people from all walks of life with different ideas here. You will find trends, but no unanimity.
[+] [-] bordercases|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hairy_man674|9 years ago|reply
Psychology, with view to its practical (non-research) use has not helped me, but at least three people I know say they benefitted from cognitive behavioural therapy. Perhaps in the future, medicine and science will subordinate it to the same role of philosophy to better explain human behaviour and thinking as the latter did in less techical approaches for centuries. [2]
And yes, I am somewhat skeptical of said blog posts that cite some "new study" claiming to explain something only to be refuted or contradicted months later.
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
[2] Wittgenstein conceded that philosophy in the 20th century would only be useful in itsapproaches to linguistics and language
[+] [-] hathawsh|9 years ago|reply
Incidentally, I noticed these cognitive biases probably apply equally well to strong AI (artificial intelligence). No matter how powerful an AI is, it's always going to lack some information, it will take time to calculate things, it will lack experience, and it will not have enough memory capacity to remember every detail. Strong AI will probably have to learn to use cognitive biases.
[+] [-] triangleman|9 years ago|reply
It should be heartening that most science topics here are treated with this kind of Feynmanian attitude, always willing to accept contradictory evidence, always reluctant to draw strong conclusions.
[+] [-] kerbalspacepro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|9 years ago|reply
For example, US space research at NASA may be awash in politics, crippled by a lack of long-term vision, and overly focused on military applications, but space is still cool.
The workings of the mind and the results of cognitive biases are fascinating, but that doesn't excuse poor statistics and a lack of rigor.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
yes
[+] [-] oldmanjay|9 years ago|reply
Yes and no. Yes, we are all different people. No, there is not much sense to grouping us based on a single dimension. That is an excellent example of what Vonnegut called a granfalloon.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] icantdrive55|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Goladus|9 years ago|reply
Generally, it is not necessary to understand every single type of cognitive bias in a nuanced way to mitigate the problems. Indeed, sometimes cognitive biases overlap to the extent that trying to mitigate one, you'll wind up affected by another. What's important is that your behavior and social rules be oriented towards uncovering truth through dialectic methods.
Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, recently posted a terrific video on the the issue viewpoint diversity on college campuses-- specifically, the lack of it. Problems of confirmation bias are exaggerated, especially in social sciences, when there's a lack of viewpoint diversity on campus. When everyone likes the conclusions put forth by a paper, no one is motivated to find the flaws. Thus the flaws are not found, the flawed papers get cited by other papers, and you wind up with a knowledge base that is increasingly divorced from reality. Whether you know the name for that bias or not is less relevant than actually addressing the structural problems.
[+] [-] adamweld|9 years ago|reply
Interestingly, he won his nobel prize in the field of economics, but he's a psychologist, not an economist. His research was so influential that it changed business strategies (esp. around how meetings are held) forever.
I can't say enough good things about Thinking Fast and Slow. Go read it.
I posted this article in reply to another comment in this thread, but I think many will find it interesting and useful. It's a good jumping off point into his research and why it's important.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-peopl...
[+] [-] davemel37|9 years ago|reply
Many biases cannot be overcome even with knowing about them... but accepting that it's possible I'm wrong and that the crazy guy on the other side is both sincere in his competing belief and possibly correct, allows me to evolve and learn and ultimately get along with more people.
I have some strongly held beliefs and opinions...But I try to keep my mind open and without considering cognitive biases, you are going to be more close minded than you should be in most cases.
[+] [-] BeetleB|9 years ago|reply
As someone who just finished reading his book, I must ask for clarification. Is he talking about lack of diversity in the student body, or in the faculty body?
I know he has published work showing a bias against conservatives in his field...
[+] [-] carsongross|9 years ago|reply
Ideally. But keep in mind: not for everyone, and it would be in the interests of those primarily concerned with power and manipulation to convince those concerned with truth and the greater good that this is the case.
[+] [-] nojvek|9 years ago|reply
So wonderfully said. I wonder what biases AI will develop in its models
[+] [-] davemel37|9 years ago|reply
That means that we are only capturing a "tiny sliver" of whats actually happening around us.
If we only keep this small detail in mind we can be sure that lack of evidence is never proof of anything and that any evidence we do see can only be used to find the most probable of competing hypotheses and its diagnosticity should always be considered. (i.e. fever might mean you are sick but has no diagnostic value to what particular ailment you have since its consistent with other possibilities.)
Same goes for using bounce rate as a metric for web analysis...its diagnostic value on its own doesnt tell us much, but with other context, like time on site and conversion goal of site (i.e. a phone call conversion will register as a bounce if they dont navihate elsewhere.) It can tell us a lot.
[+] [-] acomar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not_that_noob|9 years ago|reply
Logic is simply a way to systematically eliminate these errors in wetware (and ultimately hardware).
[+] [-] nekopa|9 years ago|reply
When my son was born, I spent most of the wee hours testing which Star Wars theme I hummed worked best for getting him back to sleep.
(By the way, The Imperial March worked best, especially slowed down and rocking him on every 4th beat)
[+] [-] cwingrav|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharemywin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellofunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g4nt1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindfulgeek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomInteger4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|9 years ago|reply
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*71TzKnr7bzXU_l_pU...
I'm working with a largish ontology of my own I'd like to present to 2-3 and possibly more levels of depth. GraphViz isn't cutting it.
(I'd asked Manoogian himself, he vaguely pointed at some R graphics tools, which was as far as I've gotten.)
[+] [-] anton_tarasenko|9 years ago|reply
Lab results confirming cognitive biases come from testing small groups of students (up to 200). Among other things, it means: (1) respondents with similar background, so we can't generalize (2) respondents don't care about outcomes, (3) tests are synthetic. Plus publication bias and other standard issues.
These results are themselves a sort of confirmation bias.
Mistakes in real life happen when we don't know what we're doing. If a person can learn, he'll discover systematic mistakes. But that comes with domain experience, not cognitive science.
[+] [-] curiousgal|9 years ago|reply
0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[+] [-] igravious|9 years ago|reply
I don't think there's anything the article author mentioned that argues against improvement through experience, critical thinking, and sensitivity to the limitations of the human mind.
[0] actually links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[+] [-] bahjoite|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inanutshellus|9 years ago|reply
A little ah-hah moment for me. :)
[+] [-] pkinsky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ensiferum|9 years ago|reply
A good thing to think about how biased your brain is, is to think of that time when you were witnessing that wonderful sunset and you decided to take a photo. Later you look at the photo and it doesn't look at all like you remember. Why? Because it's your brain playing tricks on you. You have a built in image filter in your brain that adjusts the image and your memory of it whereas the camera sees it "objectively."
Once you become aware of all the cognitive biases you just get tired of listening to people talk (about anything really), when it's full of logical holes and anecdotes. In fact it becomes painful especially when listening to some electoral candidate / politician talk about stuff that might actually matter. sigh
[+] [-] DINKDINK|9 years ago|reply
I found this section was written very pourly. /s ;]
[+] [-] dfsegoat|9 years ago|reply
I'd be interested to know which cognitive bias is at work when the instance of the post today gets 480+ points -- but no instances of this post (same title, same url) in the past 1 month garnered more than 26 pts.
I am both new to HN, and legitimately curious. Perhaps the content of the site was improved dramatically?
edit: clarity.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cognitive%20bias%20cheat%20she...
[+] [-] madenine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jones1618|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notduncansmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|9 years ago|reply
For example, trotting out cognitive biases in a rhetorical situation is often very effective, particularly when your opponent is operating in a dialectic mindset.
Know thyself, but also know thy situation.
[+] [-] zoom6628|9 years ago|reply