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I’m out here actively going against my biases and selling someone else’s house above market value 😤
Availability Heuristic looks out of place. It’s pretty much the only bias I have (beside confirmation bias, which is hard to avoid as sneaky it is), but how should one survive in this world without relying on others? Without doing a scientific bias free study on every topic in life, you’re unavoidable suffering from that bias. A healthy level would be avoiding making it a rule. I regularly disagree with friends decisions, so maybe I don’t have this bias.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
What do I win once I tick them all off?
a senate seat.
To be clear, sometimes authority bias is good and proper. For instance, valuing the opinion of a climate scientist who has been studying climate chaos for thirty years more than your Aunt who saw Rush Limbaugh say climate change is a hoax in the 1990s is normal and rational.
Basically, authority bias as a reasoning flaw stems from misidentifying who is authoritative on a subject.
In a vacuum, appealing to authority is fallacious. An idea must stand up on its own merits.
IRL, things get fuzzy. No one has the expertise and time to derive everything from first principles and redo every experiment ever performed. Thus we sadly have to have some level of trust in people.
not all bias is made equal or always something negative. Sometimes it’s good to be biased towards the opinion of a scientist over the opinion of your aunt.
I guess authority bias is most absurd when one tries to use it as a crutch to validate an argument.
You should believe me simply because ‘x’ researcher said this about the topic
How do you validate an argument?
I have to respectfully disagreed with your example. Ostensibly the researcher should be an authority. I think the example given in the chart is not quite right either. I think the confusion comes from the three definitions of “Authority”.
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the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. “he had absolute authority over his subordinates”
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a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere. “the health authorities”
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the power to influence others, especially because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something.
In your example the “Authority” is definition 3, someone with specialized knowledge of a topic that should be listened to by those who are lay on the topic.
In the chart I think they were trying to go for 1, which is the correct source of Authority Bias, but they didn’t want to step on toes or get political. The actual example is someone who has decision authority like a police officer or politician or a boss at a workplace who says things and a listener automatically believes them regardless of the speakers actual specialized knowledge of the topic they are speaking on. A better example would be “Believing a vaccine is dangerous because a politician says it is.”
This all feeds into a topic I have been kicking around in my head for a while that I have been contemplating attempting to write up as a book. “The Death of Expertise”. So many people have been so brainwashed that authorities in definition 3 are met with a frankly asinine amount of incredulity, but authorities in the first are trusted regardless of education or demonstrable specialized knowledge.
I’ll also have to respectfully disagree with you on this. If I’m listening to someone speak on a topic who is by your 3rd definition an authority on it, that is not a yardstick for them to claim correctness. Yes, i might probably be better off listening to them than a lay person, but it still doesn’t give them the right to claim correctness nor does it grant me the right to rehash these claims and say that i should be listened to since I’m regurgitating the words of an expert. All assertions should be backed up by verifiable sources.
I’m interested to hear about that book though
Fair enough argument. I do wonder who, in your opinion, is someone who can justifiably have authority on a topic if not a topic expert? Who is reasonable to be educated by?
As for the book, at this point I have not put pen to paper as it were, but the premise is the observation that there is a concerted effort on the part of some political parties to sew so much doubt in subject experts as to render their knowledge meaningless to the general populace and how dangerous that becomes when the situation is something that has potentially dire consequences. I have seen it happening for a long time, but it really came to a head for me in 2020 when I saw entirely lay politicians and pundits undermining warnings from virologists, epidemiologists, and statististians and sewing distrust in public health organizations essentially to trade people’s lives for political points. Since then I have been seeing an ever escalating trend for people in category 1 of authority to push the populace away from category 3 on topics which really only category 3 should be talking at all. The rest of us should be shutting up and taking notes, asking questions for clarification, and learning.
Abortion, gender identity, climate change, economics geopolitics, etc. Essentially every topic that has been politicized into a hot button issue is really somerhing that is so beyond complex that we should not be arguing with the people who have dedicated their entire adult lives, sometimes 40+ years, to studying.
My father has the perfect microcosm anecdote from his working days. He worked for a garage door manufacturer who hired some fresh faced MBAs into middle management. They were all sitting in a meeting one day and thought they came up with an amazing idea, so they took it to the veteran engineers who had been designing garage door openers for decades, some of them essentially since the damn things were invented, and told them to make their hairbrained idea. The enginners looked over what they were given and told them that they had had the idea decades earlier and that it did not work and that materials science and engineering had not progressed to the point that it would be feasible. Did the MBAs who were trying to make waves and make a name for themselves listen? Nope, they fired all of the veteran engineers and hired in a bunch of fresh faced engineers who had never actually designed a garage door opener and told them to build their hairbrained idea. The engineers, only knowing what they had learned in school and a couple of years in other jobs got excited by this revolutionary idea and dove into it. Fast forward about 2 years, and millions in R&D, and we find the fresh faced engineers, now not so fresh, somberly telling the MBA dickheads exactly what the veteran engineers had told them initially. This, along with a few other boneheaded schemes to make earnings sheets look better for the MBAs actually ended up tanking the company and it was sold like 10 years later.
Subject expertise matters. Respecting subject expertise matters. Being able to recognize when you are sitting atop Mount DK is one of the finest skills we could ever teach our children.
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…Bro, if you walk out of a movie, that’s just wasteful, even if it’s the shittiest thing you’ve ever seen.
Yes, but you cut your losses. No need to waste your time too after wasting money on the ticket.
But then I can’t tell my friends all the ways Fox managed to fuck up Dragon Ball: Evolution.
I mean to be fair, I think everyone knew that was going to be shit going into it.
Although to be fair to Dragon Ball Evolution it did bring Toriyama out of retirement for Super and his Swan Song Daima. (No joke, he came out of retirement because the thought of the American movie being the “Last ever new Dragon Ball content” pissed him off that much., and he knew that after GT the studio wasn’t going to do anything without him…
Course now the brand is so big that he has a successor (Toyotaro) and there’s a wing of Toei that does nothing but Dragon Ball that allegedly has ideas for the next 20 years.
The fuck was I talking about?
False Consensus Effect and Narcissistic Personality go hand in hand. Can’t tell you the amount of times my narcissistic coworker starts trash talking people I like a hell of a lot more than them assuming I agree.
What bias is it if the only entry I’ve read in this table is the one for confirmation bias?
Confirmation bias bias
Probably… Selection bias?
YSK: the Dunning-Kruger effect is controversial because it’s part of psychology’s repeatability problem.
Other famous psychology experiments like the ‘Stanford prison experiment’ or the ‘Milgram experiment’ fail to show what you learned in psych101. The prison experiment was so flawed as to be useless, and variations on the Milgram experiment show the opposite effect from the original.
For those familiar with the Milgram experiment: one variation of the study saw the “scientist” running the test replaced with a policeman or a military officer. In these circumstances, almost everybody refused to use high voltage.
Controversial in the sense that it can be easily applied to anyone. There is some substance to the idea that a person can trick themselves into thinking they know more based on limited info. A lot of these biases are like that, they aren’t cut and dry but more of an gray area where people can be fooled in various ways. Critical thinking is hard even if it’s taught, and it’s not taught well enough or at all.
And all of that is my opinion and falls into various biases, but oh well. The easiest person to fool is yourself because we are hardwired in our brain to want to be right, with rewards to ourselves when we find things that help confirm it even if the evidence is not valid. I think the best way to try and avoid the pitfalls is to always back up your claim with something. I’ve found myself often(!) erasing a response to someone because what I was going to reply didn’t have the data that I thought it did and I couldn’t show I was correct after I dug a bit to find something.
I almost deleted this for the very reason, but I want to see how it hits. I feel that knowing there’s a lot of biases that anyone can fall into can help form better reasoning and argument.
What bias would that fall under? One could assume the variation has to do with the average American’s trust of law enforcement vs their trust of a qualified person.
(Assuming the repeat experiments were done in the US that is)
Actually the reason I order the last item the server mentioned is because of crippling social anxiety
Same for not standing up in the middle of everyone to go out from watching a bad movie in the cinema.
What’s going on with the kerning?
What’s the cognitive bias for believing that any given chart is the ULTIMATE CHART. Yes yes, YOUR chart is gospel, the exhaustive definitive final chart 🙄
Oh ffs it gets worse with the Don’t Forget To Like And Subscribe whine beg plead for internet fart points at the bottom
BANNED NOT A MEME!!
Someone call the mods!
Don’t listen to the mods, it’s authority bias!
I was thinking about one of these earlier talking about Full Metal Alchemist vs FMA: Brotherhood. Everyone I’ve talked to who liked Brotherhood more, saw it first. Which makes me wonder if I would like it more had I not seen the original first.
I saw the original first. I like brotherhood better. Both have their merits. Hope that helps :)
Even with the somewhat incorrect examples, I want to print this out and hang it as a poster on my wall.
