You may have noticed that I’ve recently been fascinated by everything cognitive bias. With the release of Nudge—a book looking at how politicians around the world are using cognitive bias—the general public are now going to be hearing about it a lot more too. The Times has a nice case-study where the theories are used […]
I love lists, and so every day this week I’ll give you one to chew on. To start us off is this wonderful list of cognitive biases. To try and become a better thinker I’m studying cognitive biases in order to (attempt to) overcome them. This in itself is attempting to overcome the bias blind […]
Author of The New York Times’ Consumed column, Rob Walker, dissects a Weekly Standard article discussing the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain to answer the question: what’s the difference between rhetoric and cognitive dissonance? Both can result in points of view that are so biased that they have no connection to reality. But […]
How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such […]
366 days, 616 posts and 15,144 spam comments later, I am happy and proud to announce that Lone Gunman is now one year old (founded on February 29th 2008, I suppose it’s not even that, is it?). LG has evolved into something completely different to what I had first envisaged and the whole experience of […]