Submitted 1 year ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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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.
As long as the paper has the experiment well documented and it’s double blind, you don’t need to appeal to authority.
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
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”.
the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. “he had absolute authority over his subordinates”
a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere. “the health authorities”
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.
How do you validate an argument?
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.
Well most people will choose a politician or actor instead of unknown Nobel prize winner. That’s how we got here.
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.
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.
but how will other redditors know how smart I am if i dont regurgitate what i read on reddit
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?
Survivorship bias?
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 do I win once I tick them all off?
a senate seat.
a pair of human pants and a human burrito with meat
What’s interesting is how, even when knowing these biases, one has a tendency to often have and display at least some of them.
(At least, that’s the case for me)
Knowing these helps with self-talk. You trip over a curb and start scolding yourself. Then you can say to yourself “this is just spotlight bias”, and move on with your day, avoiding the impact of negative emotions. Or, you might be more open to a change in restaurant plans because you know of the false consensus effect. There’s subtle but real power in just naming things!
That’s a good point.
Ever since I’ve became more aware of those I’ve found myself doing similar kind of “disarming” of such falacies when I notice I’m using them.
My point it’s that it generally feels like swimming against the current.
I tripped and fell spectacularly walking in a supermarket. I was annoyed that no one helped me up or checked if I was okay (I didn’t need help but it made me think less of my fellow man) and that my partner was waiting in the car and didn’t witness it, because it was actually really funny.
I left embarrassment in my 20s. Don’t have the energy or interest in it now. And I know I’m not the main character - everyone’s living their own lives, the impact you make on strangers is minimal. At worst someone said when they got home from the shops ‘i saw this chick stack and it was kinda funny’.
Reminding yourself that no one really cares about people that don’t know is a helpful way to shut down the negative self talk.
How to develop the mental discipline to jump to naming the bias in emotional situations like that though??
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 the bottom
Ahh negativity bias, my other middle name.
:P
I’m out here actively going against my biases and selling someone else’s house above market value 😤
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.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Why is this a meme?
Someone call the mods!
Don’t listen to the mods, it’s authority bias!
theirs knoe mods here,
I’d love to see a list of names for writing devices used by trolls/propagandists thar generate completely false information of varying types. Forced binary choices when a third way is valid or the choices aren’t even related. Most of them are just plain old lies, so I don’t think the list would be too long.
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.
I’d say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.
It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy).
Personally I try to “balance” this by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I’ll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it’s not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it’s well worth investin days into researching it when you’re buying a brand new car or a house.
…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.
What’s the opposite of the False Consensus Effect, where you feel like no one probably agrees with you?
Not really a meme but cool
OP doesn’t fall for the bandwagon effect
I have a strong coherence bias. The less coherent a person, the less believable they seem.
Is there a “positivity bias” counterpart to “negativity bias”?
I’d argue that’s the outcome or survivorship bias, where people focus on the one winner or that time a thing worked and ignoring all the other failures. E.g. people think investors all swim in money because they only see the warren buffets of the world, when in reality there’s thousands, millions of people who tried the almost exact same thing and lost some or all of their savings in bad investments.
Absolutely! It’s called the Pollyanna Principle. In fact, there’s a counterpart to all of these biases that are immensely helpful in certain types of therapy.
I was thinking about this 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.
I like that this has simple examples, even if imperfect.
This is basically how I see NT myself being in the spectrum. Not to say I dont do any of those, on the contrary, Im guilty of many but I feel like they are more common on NTs (specially ones like Bandwagon Effect or Authority Bias)
What’s going on with the kerning?
Nice try trying to make me fold queen jack on the turn
vdbm@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Handbook on cognitive biases “that are particularly common and relevant to intelligence work” (67 pages) published by the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) vbs.admin.ch/…/vbs-ddps-ndb-handbuch-kognitive- v…