Economics, technology, and how we think.
I know I’ve already written twice about the Mercier/Sperber argumentation research, but this NYT piece brings to mind one more point to make. Mercier and Sperber argue that we evolved our capacity for reason largely to convince one another. They make the related point that reasoning is a social rather than an individual process. Regardless …
Continue reading “Overcoming bias means better social processes”
I highly recommend this excellent piece “The Brain on Trial” from The Atlantic’s July/August issue. This bit stood out as relevant to some of the writing I’ve been doing on overcoming bias: We may be on the cusp of finding new rehabilitative strategies as well, affording people better control of their behavior, even in the …
I have a couple quick items to post that relate to my last Atlantic post on embedding bias-correcting interventions in our media. One of them is quite belated; the other I just came across. First, here’s the gist of my initial post: Context can affect bias, and on the Web — if I can riff …
Thanks to Edge, I posted about the new research into the evolutionary basis of reason and argument well before The New York Times picked it up. But here, as a follow-up to that NYT piece, is another post that clarifies the authors’ position. Turns out it’s right in line with what I expected. Here’s what …
I have a piece up at The Atlantic (went up Friday) titled “The Future of Media Bias” that I hope you’ll read. I suppose the title is deliberately misleading, since the topic isn’t media bias in the typical sense. Here’s the premise: Context can affect bias, and on the Web — if I can riff …
Continue reading “Examples of how media could help overcome bias”
I’ve been reading a lot about cognitive biases lately, for a post I recently finished (that hopefully will be published soon) and I wanted to share a fascinating post only slightly related to that topic, that didn’t make it into my post on the subject. Jonah Lehrer has a characteristically fascinating post at Wired on …
What will the response be of people like this when Judgement Day / the rapture doesn’t arrive tomorrow? Here’s a clue.
Chris Mooney had a great piece at Mother Jones recently that has been making the rounds. The title is “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science” and it’s a good primer on some of the literature on how we rationalize to protect our biases and more generally our worldview. If you haven’t read …
Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt gave a talk in February arguing that the social psychology field was a “moral community” by virtue of its political liberalism, and that this was compromising its ability to do good science. I want to use one piece of his argument as a jumping off point to discuss what I see …
beyond the times 