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Human brains take shortcuts in making decisions. Finding where those shortcuts lead us to dumb places is what his life work has been all about. Artificial intelligences, say, Google, also have to take shortcuts, but they are *not* the same ones that our brains use. So, when an AI ends up in a weird place by taking a shortcut, that bias strikes us as uncannily weird. Get ready, too, because AI bias is going to start replacing human cognitive bias more and more regularly.

The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen.

“Its breakthrough was not in lifting nations up to higher levels of ambition, but rather in dropping expectations to the lowest common denominator.”

He argues that the treaty did little to reduce emissions because of one central flaw in the agreement’s logic: the “pledge and review” process that governed international talks. “That logic relied on a misunderstanding of what motivates developing nations,” he writes.

In an era when everyone seems eager to point out instances of “fake news,” it is easy to forget that knowing how we make sense of the news is as important as knowing how to spot incorrect or biased content

While the ability to analyze the credibility of a source and the veracity of its content remains an essential and often-discussed aspect of news literacy, it is equally important to understand how we as news consumers engage with and react to the information we find online, in our feeds, and on our apps

People process information they receive from the news in the same way they process all information around them — in the shortest, quickest way possible

The older seesaws were wooden planks that often hit asphalt directly, leading to occasional tailbone and spinal injuries, falls and pinched fingers, not to mention splinters. Children could slam each other by dismounting suddenly. Playgrounds that retained old seesaws were exposed to lawsuits.

“I think we have to take the kids out a little bit from the safety bubble,” she said, placing her 2-year-old daughter, Sadie, on a seesaw too.

“One little fall or a tooth broken and the next thing you know they are out,” she said.

Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure.

While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.

in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” “It’s Superman!”It’s the same object, the same sky. It’s even the same roar. So why do three people witnessing the same event reach different conclusions?

The answer to this question lies in how our brains are hardwired to think. We experience and interpret the world around us based on what we already know, even though sometimes what we know is flawed.

However, they cannot, because it is too impractical.

A cognitive bias is a flaw in your reasoning that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and to come to an inaccurate conclusion. Because you are flooded with information from millions of sources throughout the day, your brain develops ranking systems to decide which information deserves your attention and which information is important enough to store in memory. It also creates shortcuts meant to cut down on the time it takes for you to process information. The problem is that the shortcuts and ranking systems aren’t always perfectly objective because their architecture is uniquely adapted to your life experiences

Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely heavily on the first information you learn when you are evaluating something. In other words, what you learn early in an investigation often has a greater impact on your judgment than information you learn later. In one study, for example, researchers gave two groups of study participants some written background information about a person in a photograph. Then they asked them to describe how they thought the people in the photos were feeling. People who read more negative background information tended to infer more negative feelings, and people who read positive background information tended to infer more positive feelings. Their first impressions heavily influenced their ability to infer emotions in others.

Another common bias is the tendency to give greater credence to ideas that come to mind easily. If you can immediately think of several facts that support a judgment, you may be inclined to think that judgment is correct. For example, if a person sees multiple headlines about shark attacks in a coastal area, that person might form a belief that the risk of shark attacks is higher than it is.The American Psychological Association points out that when information is readily available around you, you’re more likely to remember it. Information that is easy to access in your memory seems more reliable.

Do heuristics, the shortcuts that the brain takes, support efficient decision making or does it impede efficient decision making?

Humans have neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time to take decisions. So, the brain has always developed smart heuristics, shortcuts to take efficient decisions.

One other key thought put forward by Gigerenzer is that there is a big difference between risk and uncertainty. We are dealing with risk when you know all the alternatives, outcomes and their probabilities. We are dealing with uncertainty when you don’t know all the alternatives, outcomes or their probabilities.

By nature, human beings are illogical and irrational.

survival meant thinking quickly, not methodically. Making a life-saving decision was more important than making a 100% accurate one, so the human brain developed an array of mental shortcuts.

"Our decisions... are guided by the perceived values at the moment of the decision - not by the potential final value."

Benoit Monin, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, showed college students 80 photos of faces, then asked them which ones they recognized from among the 40 they'd seen in an earlier session. The more attractive the photo (as rated by another group of students) the more likely it was to be recognized—regardless of whether the face had been seen before.

"The face's attractiveness actually changes your perception of your past," in this case, the perception of whether you've seen the face before. The shortcut may lead to errors, but it may also help us manage our busy lives, says Monin. "We tend to like familiar things, so it makes perfect sense that over time we would use liking as a clue to familiarity."

In what he calls the "warm-glow heuristic," people consider their affinity for a specific person or place as an indicator of familiarity. As with other mental shortcuts, people resort to this heuristic when they lack enough data on which to base their decisions.

Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”

The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?”

the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.

As noted by meme database Know Your Meme, Trash Dove exploded in popularity after it was featured alongside a dancing cat on a Thai Facebook page with millions of followers

Pigeons are such strange birds, they have very beautiful mottled, shimmery feathers, but they waddle around and bob their heads and beg for crumbs. They’re like beautiful doves, except they eat trash.

The fan art and nice comments have been the highlight for me, but I’m amazed at how mean people can be to someone they’ve never met, because of something silly online.

The research arm of dating site OKCupid looked at 500,000 first contacts and concluded that "netspeak, bad grammar and bad spelling are huge turn-offs"

correct use of apostrophes was appealing. Using "don't" and "won't" caused better than average response rates - 36% and 37% respectively, according to the research.

But grammar can be a linguistic minefield. Grammarians argue it ensures clarity and elegance. For others, it is a series of archaic rules beloved of pedants, bearing little relation to how people really communicate.

"the Middle East is a powder keg, and today the fuse is getting shorte

"armchair isolationists"

"America's poodle"

I think it’s safe to claim that magical thinking emerges from basic underlying cognitive mechanisms — shortcuts that we take, biases, heuristics.

A more controversial claim, which is very possible, is that magical thinking is an exaptation. An exaptation is some adaptation that emerged as a byproduct of something else, but became so useful that evolution started to select for aspects of that in addition to the initial thing.

Some people have argued that belief in god probably emerged from dualism, anthropomorphism and teleological reasoning. But then it became such a useful idea on its own that now we’re evolving to have a stronger belief in god, because belief in god is evolutionarily adaptive.

Philosophers often refer to this as the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony. Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of unusual phenomena

The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.

Pierre Duhem suggested in 1908 that, as Sober puts it: “it is wrong to think that hypothesis H makes predictions about observation O; it is the conjunction of H&A [where A is a set of auxiliary hypotheses] that issues in testable consequences.”

People who are empathetic are more sensitive to the perspectives and sufferings of others. They are more likely to make compassionate moral judgments.

The problem comes when we try to turn feeling into action. Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action. In the early days of the Holocaust, Nazi prison guards sometimes wept as they mowed down Jewish women and children, but they still did it.

These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them

The 'supermarket shoppers' were brain-scanned to test their reactions to promotions and special offers in a major cutting-edge project by UK-based SBXL, one of Europe's leading shopping behaviour specialists and Bangor University's respected School of Psychology.

We know from other research that people are not as good at making rational decisions as they might expect, often using "rules of thumb" and educated guesses to evaluate decisions. Using brain imaging techniques we hope to get a better understanding of how the brain responds to special offers and how this may influence the decisions we make. This also gives us the chance to do some research on how we make decisions in a real world context."

Our data also agrees with previous research suggesting that as offers, or decisions get more complex, instead of working things out, our brains take shortcuts, and may guess that an offer is good. Interestingly, in our study people were just as good at selecting good complex offers from bad as they were for less complex ones, suggesting this guessing method may be as good in some cases as "working it out"."