Why The Cold War Between Tech CEOs and Trump Is About To Go Nuclear

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1KIKI

Wednesday, February 1, 2017 10:54 AM

The moral for making better decisions is clear: wanting to be fair and objective alone isn't enough. What's needed are practical methods for correcting our limited reasoning – and a major limitation is our imagination for how else things might be. If we're lucky, someone else will point out these alternatives, but if we're on our own we can still take advantage of crutches for the mind like the "consider the opposite" strategy.

"Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170131-why-wont-some-people-listen-t
o-reason

How to get people to overcome their bias

How do you persuade somebody of the facts? Asking them to be fair, impartial and unbiased is not enough. To explain why, psychologist Tom Stafford analyses a classic scientific study.
By Tom Stafford

31 January 2017

One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe. If we hear gossip about a rival we tend to think "I knew he was a nasty piece of work"; if we hear the same about our best friend we're more likely to say "that's just a rumour". If you don't trust the government then a change of policy is evidence of their weakness; if you do trust them the same change of policy can be evidence of their inherent reasonableness.

Once you learn about this mental habit – called confirmation bias – you start seeing it everywhere.

This matters when we want to make better decisions. Confirmation bias is OK as long as we're right, but all too often we’re wrong, and we only pay attention to the deciding evidence when it’s too late.

How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens. There are, broadly, two possible accounts and a classic experiment from researchers at Princeton University pits the two against each other, revealing in the processing a method for overcoming bias.

One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways the world could be different

The first theory of confirmation bias is the most common. It's the one you can detect in expressions like "You just believe what you want to believe", or "He would say that, wouldn't he?" or when the someone is accused of seeing things a particular way because of who they are, what their job is or which friends they have. Let's call this the motivational theory of confirmation bias. It has a clear prescription for correcting the bias: change people's motivations and they'll stop being biased.

The alternative theory of confirmation bias is more subtle. The bias doesn't exist because we only believe what we want to believe, but instead because we fail to ask the correct questions about new information and our own beliefs. This is a less neat theory, because there could be one hundred reasons why we reason incorrectly – everything from limitations of memory to inherent faults of logic. One possibility is that we simply have a blindspot in our imagination for the ways the world could be different from how we first assume it is. Under this account the way to correct confirmation bias is to give people a strategy to adjust their thinking. We assume people are already motivated to find out the truth, they just need a better method. Let's call this the cognition theory of confirmation bias.

Confirmatory evidence strengthened people's views, as you'd expect, but so did disconfirmatory evidence

Thirty years ago, Charles Lord and colleagues published a classic experiment which pitted these two methods against each other. Their study used a persuasion experiment which previously had shown a kind of confirmation bias they called 'biased assimilation'. Here, participants were recruited who had strong pro- or anti-death penalty views and were presented with

1KIKI

Wednesday, February 1, 2017 12:55 PM

let me sum it up by saying they're all against it

http://www.investopedia.com/news/cook-zuckerberg-bezos-tech-ceos-trump
s-immigration-order-aapl-fb/

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc

Facebook Inc. (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Twitter Inc.'s (TWTR) CEO, Jack Dorsey

Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb

Jeff Bezos, leader of ecommerce giant Amazon.com Inc

Logan Green, Lyft