The tendency to suppress or ignore the inconsistencies that challenge our worldviews is thus universal rather than partisan

Around the start of ski season this year, we talked about my plans to go skiing that weekend, and later that day he started seeing skiing-related ads.He thinks it's because his phone listened into the conversation, but it could just as easily have been that it was spending more time near my phone

One reason that we might jump to a wrong understanding is that we approach the conversation with our own assumptions. And that can cause us to only hear or see one possible meaning, the one that we expect to hear. This is called bias confirmation.

Look how he laughs already!

Obviously, recently, it no longer had any sources within Hamas. Its blindness is no less astonishing. For example, journalists had reported in recent months that many Hamas militants regularly went out to train on motorbikes, and even learned to fly light aircraft; and yet the Israeli services saw nothing of it. This is a major flaw for which they will have to answer one day.

Are both governments more incentivized to the status quo than a true peace? Yes. Because mortal enemies help us justify the things that we already want to do.

The participants in both the 2018 and the retracted 2023 studies were recruited from online communities that were explicitly critical about many aspects of gender-affirming care for transgender kids.

The third and probably most serious difficulty in making good reflective decisions is confirmation bias.

It feels like « removing spring » is one of those unchallenged truths like « always remove Turbolinks » or « never use fixtures ». It also feels like a confirmation bias when it goes wrong.

The velocity of social sharing, the power of recommendation algorithms, the scale of social networks, and the accessibility of media manipulation technology has created an environment where pseudo events, half-truths, and outright fabrications thrive.

Reading, especially rereading, caneasily fool us into believing we understand a text. Rereading isespecially dangerous because of the mere-exposure effect: Themoment we become familiar with something, we start believing wealso understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more(Bornstein 1989).

The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanelystarts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about,is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant.

“I had [...]during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever apublished fact, a new observation or thought came across me, whichwas opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of itwithout fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such factsand thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory thanfavorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raisedagainst my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted toanswer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.

What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.

02:18 So we gave people information and as a result it caused polarization, it didn’t cause 02:23 people to come together.

Frame of reference has been manipulatedCrime statistics are often manipulated for political purposes by comparing to a year when crime was very high. This can expressed either as a change (down 60% since 2004) or via an index (40, where 2004 = 100). In either of these cases, 2004 may or may not be an appropriate year for comparison. It could have been an unusually high crime year.This also happens when comparing places. If I want to make one country look bad, I simply express the data about it relative to whichever country which is doing the best.This problem tends to crop up in subjects where people have a strong confirmation bias. (“Just as I thought, crime is up!”) Whenever possible try comparing rates from several different starting points to see how the numbers shift. And whatever you do, don’t use this technique yourself to make a point you think is important. That’s inexcusable.

Consider, for instance, the footage that has been circulating from a New York City Council hearing, held over Zoom in June, which shows Krug in her Afro-Latinx pose. She introduces herself as Jess La Bombalera, a nickname apparently of her own making, adapted from Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican genre of music and dance. Broadcasting live from “El Barrio,” and wearing purple-tinted shades and a hoop in her nose, she lambasts gentrifiers, shouts out her “black and brown siblings,” and twice calls out “white New Yorkers” for not yielding their speaking time. What stands out, though, is the way Krug speaks, in a patchy accent that begins with thickly rolled “R”s and transitions into what can best be described as B-movie gangster. This is where desire outruns expertise. The Times, in a piece on Krug’s exposure, last week, nonetheless called this a “Latina accent,” lending credence to Krug’s performance. (The phrase was later deleted.) The offhand notation is a tiny example of the buy-in Krug has been afforded her entire scholastic career, by advisers and committee members and editors and colleagues. They failed to recognize the gap not between real and faux, so much, as between something thrown-on and something lived-in. That inattentiveness was Krug’s escape hatch.

The real enemy of independent thinking is not any external authority, but our own inertia. We need to find ways to counteract confirmation bias – our tendency to take into account only information that confirms what we already believe. We need to regularly confront our errors, mistakes, and misunderstandings. 

Confirmation bias is pretty much what you think it is. You get an idea in your head and you go looking for evidence to confirm that it’s true. If any evidence comes up to challenge it, you cry “Fake news!” and move on with your life.

Scholars have known for decades that people tend to search for and believe information that confirms what they already think is true. The new elements are social media and the global networks of friends who use it. People let their guard down on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where friends, family members, and coworkers share photos, gossip, and a wide variety of other information. That’s one reason why people may fall for false news, as S. Shyam Sundar, a Pennsylvania State University communication professor, explains in The Conversation. Another reason: People are less skeptical of information they encounter on platforms they have personalized — through friend requests and “liked” pages, for instance — to reflect their interests and identity.

they’d identified websites online that “proved” their beliefs.