449 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. Research shows that moving our hands advances our understanding ofabstract or complex concepts, reduces our cognitive load, and improves ourmemory.

      movement and gesture as a mnemonic device

    1. Newton arranged an experiment in which one person — a “tapper” — was asked to tap out the melody of a popular song, while another person — the “listener” — was asked to identify it. The tappers assumed that their listeners would correctly identify about 50% of their melodies; they were amazed to learn that the listeners only got about one out of 40 songs correct. To the tappers, their melodies sounded perfectly clear and obvious, but the listeners heard no music, no instrumentation in their heads — only the muffled noise of a finger tapping on a table.

      An example of the curse of knowledge effect.

  2. Feb 2022
    1. Read for Understanding

      Ahrens goes through a variety of research on teaching and learning as they relate to active reading, escaping cognitive biases, creating understanding, progressive summarization, elaboration, revision, etc. as a means of showing and summarizing how these all dovetail nicely into a fruitful long term practice of using a slip box as a note taking method. This makes the zettelkasten not only a great conversation partner but an active teaching and learning partner as well. (Though he doesn't mention the first part in this chapter or make this last part explicit.)

    2. 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 mere-exposure effect can be dangerous when rereading a text because we are more likely to falsely believe we understand it. Robert Bornstein's research from 1989 indicates that we will tend to like the text more, which can pull us into confirmation bias.

      Bornstein, Robert F. 1989. “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis of Research, 1968-1987.” Psychological Bulletin 106 (2): 265–89.

    3. psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe wehave become good at it – completely independent of our actualperformance (Bornstein 1989). We unfortunately tend to confusefamiliarity with skill.

      The mere-exposure effect leads us to confuse familiarity with a process with actual skill.

    4. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

      Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.


      The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

      This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

    5. Just followyour interest and always take the path that promises the mostinsight.

      What specific factors does one evaluate for determining what particular paths will provide actual (measurable) insight?

      Most people have a personal gut reaction about which directions to go in heuristically, but can these heuristics be broken down explicitly to enable better evaluating them? How can they be used to avoid cognitive biases?

    1. Research is needed to determine the situations in which the redundancy principle does not hold

      p. 144-145

      The authors describe limits to the research (circa 2016) as follows: 1. Kinds of learners, 2. kinds of material, and 3. kinds of presentation methods. Each of these situations present interesting possibilities for research related to the use of closed captions used by first-year law students while watching course-related videos.

      When considering how "kinds of learners" might be relevant, the authors ask how redundant on-screen text might hurt or help non-native speakers of a language or learners with very low prior knowledge. It is probably reasonable to consider first-year law students as having "very low prior knowledge". Is there any sense in which those same students could be understand as having overlapping characteristics with TBD

    2. Principle 2: Consider Adding On‐Screen Text to Narration in Special Situations

      p. 139-141

      Clark and Mayer describe a key exception to the first principle they describe. One of the special situations they describe consists of when a learner must "exert greater cognitive effort to comprehend spoken text rather than printed text" (p. 140). This could be when the verbal material is complex and challenging, such as when learners are learning another language or when terminology is challenging such as might be encountered in scientific, technical, or legal(?) domains (p. 141).

      [P]rinting unfamiliar technical terms on the screen may actually reduce cognitive processing because the learner does not need to grapple with decoding the spoken words.

      However, it may be necessary to ensure that video is slow-paced or learner-controlled under circumstances where both audio narration and on-screen text are provided. Mayer, Lee, and Peebles (2014) found that when video is fast-paced, redundant text can cause cognitive overload, even when learners are non-native speakers.

      Mayer, R. E., Lee, H., & Peebles, A. (2014). Multimedia Learning in a Second Language: A Cognitive Load Perspective. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(5), 653–660. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3050

    3. boundary conditions.

      p. 131-132

      Clark and Mayer provide a brief summary of the boundary conditions, the situations in which learners benefit from the use redundant on-screen text. These situations include adding printed text when 1) there are no graphics, 2) the presentation rate of the on-screen text is slow or learner-controlled, 3) the narration includes technical or unfamiliar words, and the 3) on-screen text is shorter than the audio narration.

      The first three conditions described bear some similarity to closed caption use by students in legal education watching class lecture videos, especially students in first-year courses. Typically, the students are viewing videos with very few detailed graphics, they have control over the speed, pause, review, and advance features of the video player, and the narration provides numerous legal terms.

      Although closed captions are intended for hard of hearing and deaf viewers, they may have some benefits for other learners if the boundary conditions described by the authors turn out to be true. Dello Stritto and Linder (2017) shared findings from a large survey of post-secondary students reporting that a range of students found closed captions to be helpful.

      Dello Stritto, M. E., & Linder, K. (2017). A Rising Tide: How Closed Captions Can Benefit All Students. Educause Review Online. https://er.educause.edu:443/articles/2017/8/a-rising-tide-how-closed-captions-can-benefit-all-students

    4. graphics using words in both on‐screen text and audio narration in which the audio repeats the text. We call this technique redundant on‐screen text because the printed text (on‐screen text) is redundant with the spoken text (narration or audio).

      Clark and Mayer provide a definition of redundant: Graphics accompanied by words in both on-screen text and audio narration in which that text is repeated. p. 131

      The authors go on to provide guidance about concurrent graphics, audio, and on-screen text. Based upon the research that they summarize in Chapter Seven, they advise instructors not to add printed text to an on screen graphic.

      p. 131

    1. Heesakkers, H., van der Hoeven, J. G., Corsten, S., Janssen, I., Ewalds, E., Simons, K. S., Westerhof, B., Rettig, T. C. D., Jacobs, C., van Santen, S., Slooter, A. J. C., van der Woude, M. C. E., van den Boogaard, M., & Zegers, M. (2022). Clinical Outcomes Among Patients With 1-Year Survival Following Intensive Care Unit Treatment for COVID-19. JAMA, 327(6), 559–565. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2022.0040

    1. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone to know that there are certain activities that help create that space, and it’s been widely commented upon. Doing the dishes, walking the dog, cleaning the house – you need to be doing something.For me, pruning trees in our olive grove is perfect. It takes a little bit of attention, but not that much attention.

      This is related to the idea of diffuse thinking caused by taking breaks or doing things that don't require extreme concentration. Flaneuring... walking, etc.

      You want an activity that requires a little bit of attention but not too much attention. Doing dishes, walking, errands, etc. are good examples.

      Relate this to the

  3. Jan 2022
    1. Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems.

      Tech solutionism is the presumption that technology (usually by itself) can fix a variety of social, cultural, and structural problems.

      It fits into a category of problem that when one's tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

      Many tech solutionism problems are likely ill-defined to begin with. Many are also incredibly complex and difficult which also tends to encourage bikeshedding, which is unlikely to lead us to appropriate solutions.

    1. it’s insecure unless the credentials are served over an encrypted HTTPS connection

      The same is true for login systems that use cookies, but no one cites that as a downside. There's an asymmetric standard being applied to HTTP native authentication.

    1. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlierversion of ourselves;

      It is likely a good broad generality that from a historical perspective, those looking at people from the past do so by considering them simply an earlier version of ourselves.

      This sort of isocultural cognitive bias is something to be very cognizant of particularly in cases without extensive context as it is likely to cause massive context collapse.

    1. The study of cognitive development suffers from a deep theoretical tension – one with ancient philosophical roots.

      This could've been a good place to allow liberal arts folx some point of entry. Alas.

    1. Fernandez-Castaneda, A., Lu, P., Geraghty, A. C., Song, E., Lee, M.-H., Wood, J., Yalcin, B., Taylor, K. R., Dutton, S., Acosta-Alvarez, L., Ni, L., Contreras-Esquivel, D., Gehlhausen, J. R., Klein, J., Lucas, C., Mao, T., Silva, J., Pena-Hernandez, M., Tabachnikova, A., … Monje, M. (2022). Mild respiratory SARS-CoV-2 infection can cause multi-lineage cellular dysregulation and myelin loss in the brain (p. 2022.01.07.475453). https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.07.475453

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 4). “Importantly, higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of all symptoms, except loss of smell & cognitive symptoms” ....as someone who studies cognition I didn’t find that as reassuring as possibly intended... [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1478341731707981829

  4. Dec 2021
    1. When we simply guess as to whathumans in other times and places might be up to, we almostinvariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky– in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

      Definitely worth keeping in mind, even for my own work. Providing an evidential structure for claims will be paramount.

      Is there a well-named cognitive bias for the human tendency to see everything as nails when one has a hammer in their hand?

    2. ‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that theycouldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’

      Part of their point here seems to be that Pinker is suffering from a form of bias related to the most sensational cases which will tend to heighten the availability bias. (Is there a name for this sort of sensationalism effect?)

      Is there also some survivorship bias at play here as well?

      We don't have access to a wide statistical survey of dead bodies from a large swath of times and places which makes it difficult to determine actual numbers.

    3. Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spendsmuch time watching the news, let alone who knows much about thehistory of the twentieth century.

      Are they suffering from potential availability heuristic (cognitive bias) here? Are they encouraging it in us? Just because we see violence on the news every day doesn't mean it's ubiquitous.

      Apparently we'll need real evidence here to provide actual indications.

      Does Steven Pinker provide archaeological evidence in his book? What are the per capita rates of violence and/or death over time?

    1. Cognitive Development

      SAMPLE ANNOTATION

      As an instructor with a background in K12, I came to post-secondary with a history of writing objectives as measurable skills. Now I see growth is a much better goal than some arbitrary skill and Fosnot & Perry (1996) agree.

      Reference

      Fosnot, C.T. & Perry, R.S. (1996). Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning. Galactic Challenge. https://gchallenge.org/constructivism-a-psychological-theory-of-learning-2/

    1. In a nutshell, then, there was never a time when humans uniformly lived in small, simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, and a time when they started to switch to agriculture- thus inevitably switching to a  sedentary, hierarchical, and more complex life style. This is not because the correct trajectory is a different one, but because there was never a linear trajectory to begin with.

      Is there a reason or cognitive bias we've got that would tend to make us think that there's a teleological outcome in these cases?

      Why should it seem like there would be a foregone conclusion to all of human life or history? Why couldn't/shouldn't it just keep evolving from its current context to the next

    1. In fact, the methodical use of notebooks changed the relationship between natural memory and artificial memory, although contemporaries did not immediately realize it. Historical research supports the idea that what was once perceived as a memory aid was now used as secondary memory.18

      During the 16th century there was a transition in educational centers from using the natural and artificial memories to the methodical use of notebooks and commonplace books as a secondary memory saved by means of writing.

      This allows people in some sense to "forget" what they've read and learned and be surprised by it again later. They allow themselves to create liminal memories which may be refreshed and brought to the center later. Perhaps there is also some benefit in this liminal memory for allowing ideas to steep on the periphery before using them. Perhaps combinatorial creativity happens unconsciously?

      Cross reference: learning research by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski.

  5. Nov 2021
    1. it was assumed that rational thought was value free it was just you know about what was true in the world and so 00:26:06 on and it's not because you're concerned with empathy and morality when you're thinking and and with emotion rational thought is really value-based 00:26:19 now whoa let's go back one there's a further view Descartes assumed that all rationality was the same for everybody that it was universal that what made us 00:26:34 human beings was being rational and logical and that therefore everybody had the same mode of reasoning now if that's true then all you have to do let's say 00:26:47 in politics is tell something somebody to facts and everybody will reason to the same conclusion right sure not true that is if enlightenment reason were 00:27:01 right that would happen it doesn't happen it turns out that it is not the case that all concepts are you are universal and that all of them are 00:27:13 accessible to everybody and then there's another view of you coming out of the postmodern thought that says no concepts are universal they're all arbitrary that's also false many concepts are 00:27:26 universal and many are not a very and it's an empirical question which is which and they vary from language to language and that's important you need to know that it is not the case that 00:27:41 everything with all thought is universal and it's not the case that that's all language particular or particular that is you need to know empirically what part is shared with other people who 00:27:53 speak other languages and come from other cultures and what part is not and that is an important empirical study so the big myth is this but there is some objective rational structure to the 00:28:07 world out there and that human reason can fit it directly and characterize it literally without frames or metaphors and reason about it adequately with formal logic alone that's just false the 00:28:21 world is real that is whatever it is our bodies and brains provide understandings of the world which depend on frames metaphors image schemas prototypes narratives all of those things and it is 00:28:35 that that permits us to create

      Rational thought and emotions are entwined at the deepest level. Also, what Lakoff says about universals is very important as we consider how we unite and depolarize politics. We need to find the common denominators, but this is not such a simple task.

  6. Oct 2021
    1. 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.

      One of the flaws of Mark Zuckerberg's spectrum disorder is that he either has no sense of shame or his confirmation bias and loss aversion biases are incredibly large.

    1. There are many other more subtle biases of the evolved human brain—its tendency to focus on the thing that changes rather than the thing that’s constant,

      Is there a name for this bias?

  7. Sep 2021
    1. Nicholas Carr explores cognitive science and media theory to understand how technology is change our brains through neuroplasticity.

      Ezra Klein was in conversation with Richard Powers regarding his recent book, Bewilderment, exploring the way technology changes us by changing our environment. The medium is the message.

    1. The effects of spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically as never before, and many studies have shown that religious and spiritual practices generally make people happier and healthier.
    1. One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.

      Thinking in solitary can increase one's susceptibility to confirmation bias. Thinking in groups can mitigate this.

      How might keeping one's notes in public potentially help fight against these cognitive biases?

      Is having a "conversation in the margins" with an author using annotation tools like Hypothes.is a way to help mitigate this sort of cognitive bias?

      At the far end of the spectrum how do we prevent this social thinking from becoming groupthink, or the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility?

    1. A recent review of the evidence finds that when students are cognitively overloaded, they disengage more often, perform badly and learn less. You can help students stay focused by making your presentations less cognitively overloaded. So, shorten slides, reduce text, use diagrams, remove irrelevant images, progressively reveal content and stick to one idea per slide. Take a careful look at the materials you use and ask yourself: “What’s my main message? What distracts from that? How can I remove distractions?”

      This feels related to some of the potential power of sketchnotes.

      I'd like the reference to this particular research though.

    1. Billionaire business owners deployed lobbyists to make sure Trump’s 2017 tax bill was tailored to their benefit. Confidential IRS records show the windfall that followed.

      @choppa1890 says "will read and get mad about one of these days"

      With respect.....this learned attitude is the leading contributor to the problem with modern America. The quote reflects cognitive dissonance that is dealt with through a weak form of denial. @choppa1890 uses a mentally acceptable task (posting in Hypothesis) and 'avoidance', to resolve the dissonance. @choppa1890 can not allow him/herself to read the article, create knowledge and emotion. It's too much to think about so I will make a note in Hypothesis and move on!

  8. Aug 2021
    1. The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

      Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

      Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

      Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

      Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

      Some core ideas of critical race theory:

      • racial realism
        • racism is normal
      • interest convergence
        • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
      • Whiteness as property
        • Cheryl Harris' work
        • White people have privilege in the law
        • myth of meritocracy
      • Intersectionality

      People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

      Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

      Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

      KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

      SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

      • Law enforcement got upset and the school district
      • Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
      • Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

      It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

      What are you afraid of?

    1. Named after Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, in psychology the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

      People remember interrupted or unfinished tasks better than completed tasks.

      Examples: I've had friends remember where we left off on conversations months/years later and we picked right back up.

      I wonder what things effect these memories/abilities? Context? Importance? Other?

    1. you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder"

      Like people who can't wrap their head around the idea that evolution has nothing to do with any kind of purpose to produce humans. (Even starting from the position that humans are the "end result" is fundamentally flawed.)

  9. Jul 2021
    1. PDFs used to be large, and although they are still larger thanequivalent HTML, they are still an order of magnitude smaller than thetorrent of JavaScript sewage pumped down to your browser by mostsites

      It was only 6 days ago that an effective takedown of this type of argument was hoisted to the top of the discussion on HN:

      This latter error leads people into thinking the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, so "When someone in my tribe does something bad, they're not really in my tribe (No True Scotsman / it's a false flag)" whereas "When someone in the other tribe does something bad, that proves that everyone in that tribe deserves to be punished".

      and:

      I'm pretty sure the combination of those two is 90% of the "cyclists don't obey the law" meme. When a cyclist breaks the law they make the whole out-group look bad, but a driver who breaks the law is just "one bad driver."¶ The other 10% is confirmation bias.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27816612

    1. A top down view of some learning strategies to begin teasing out which may be better than others.

      Are they broadly applicable or domain specific?

      What learning methods and pedagogy piece are best and for which domains.

      How can we balance learning and doing an overview of theory versus practice?

      Which methods are better for beginners versus domain specific experts?

      Which are better for overview versus creating new knowledge?

      https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2021/07/13/against-the-real-thing/

    2. Play may trump problem solving. When working on a problem without a specific goal, the student can try lots of things to figure out what works. In contrast, only one answer is needed to solve a problem with a single goal. A playful, exploratory mindset may map out the patterns of interactions better than a narrowly, solution-oriented perspective. As an example of this, Sweller asked students to solve some math problems. One group was asked to solve the problems for a particular variable, and the other group was asked to solve for as many variables as they could. The latter group did better later, which Sweller explained in terms of cognitive load.4

      exploratory play >> problem solving

      How does this compare to the creativity experience of naming white things in general versus naming white things in a refrigerator? The first is often harder for people, while the second is usually much easier.

  10. Jun 2021
  11. May 2021
    1. As one of the authors recently pointed out [2], the cognitive demands on a person in a low-tech, paleolithic environment equal or exceed the cognitive loads placed on members of industrialized societies.

      I'll have to bump up Tyson Yunkaporta's work on my reading list, particularly the cited text:

      Yunkaporta T. Sand talk: how Indigenous thinking can save the world. Melbourne, Victoria: Text Publishing Company; 2019.

    1. Examples of this sort of non-logical behaviour used to represent identity can be found in fiction in:

      • Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book (Random House,1984) which is based on
      • the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels, which was based on an argument over the correct end to crack an egg once soft-boiled.

      It almost seems related to creating identity politics as bike-shedding because the real issues are so complex that most people can't grasp all the nuances, so it's easier to choose sides based on some completely other heuristic. Changing sides later on causes too much cognitive dissonance, so once on a path, one must stick to it.

  12. Mar 2021
    1. Such research drew from Baruch Fischhoff's work in 1975 surrounding hindsight bias, a cognitive bias that knowing the outcome of a certain event makes it seem more predictable than may actually be true.[5] Research conducted by Fischhoff revealed that participants did not know that their outcome knowledge affected their responses, and, if they did know, they could still not ignore or defeat the effects of the bias.
  13. Feb 2021
    1. every human has a defined cognitive load that the memory can process. Making anyone process more information than defined will result in cognitive overloading.
    1. 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.

      This is an important point and when politicians are speaking it, they should cite their sources meticulously.

    1. When we gain cognitive distance from our own thoughts, it’s as though we’re taking off the spectacles and looking at them, rather than looking through them
  14. Jan 2021
    1. Watched

      [[Verna Myers]]: [[How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them]] [[Ted Talk]]

      Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we've seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Verna Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

      "Stare at awesome black people."

      Look for discomfirming data

      "Walk toward your discomfort."

      When you see something, have the courage to say something. ie "We don't say those things anymore."

    1. Cognitive fusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you suddenly notice a car driving towards you at a high speed, you don’t want to get stuck pondering about how the feeling of danger is actually a mental construct produced by your brain. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible, with minimal mental clutter interfering with your actions. Likewise, if you are doing programming or math, you want to become at least partially fused together with your understanding of the domain, taking its axioms as objective facts so that you can focus on figuring out how to work with those axioms and get your desired results.

      Cognitive Fusion serves an important role

      When you are driving a car, you want to be fused with its internal logic, because it will allow you to respond in the quickest possible way to threats. (I'm not sure if this is the same thing though)

    1. A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.

      The result of the heuristics we use.

    1. “Cognitive Reframing” is a technique used in therapy where patients are taught to look at things from another perspective. This technique helps patients look at the same event with different points of view, and has been proven to help improve their self-talk and behaviour. We are, after all, made up of the stories we tell ourselves.

      Cognitive Reframing - Technique to let patients look at situations from different perspectives.

      • Helps with self talk and behavior
      • Helps with narratives about ourselves
  15. Dec 2020
    1. Corker, K. S., Arnal, J., Bonfiglio, D. B. V., Curran, P. G., Chartier, C. R., Chopik, W. J., Guadagno, R., Kimbrough, A., Schmidt, K., & Wiggins, B. J. (2020). Many Labs 5: Registered Replication of Albarracín et al. (2008), Experiment 7. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/qzspr

  16. Nov 2020
    1. Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task, or is just plain annoying to do.

      This is the task that you're required to do when you want to save a note in Evernote or Notion. You need to choose where it goes.

    1. A quick clarification — it’s important to note I’m differentiating “Diversity of Thought” from neurodiversity, which aims to make room for neurological differences (Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autistic Spectrum, Tourette Syndrome, and others) and advocates for access to various communities often marginalized.

      It's good to call out the distinction from [[neurodiversity]] from [[cognitive diversity]] and [[diversity of thought]]

      When thinking of [[neurodiversity]] - there is also the intersectionality of being Black, a Person of Color, etc and being neurodiverse.

    1. 4 Steps to Getting Started with Cognitive Diversity Don’t expect that bringing together a bunch of people with widely different backgrounds and experiences will be the miracle cure for all your business problems. Go beyond the surface to get the benefits of diversity of thought: Define cognitive diversity within your organization and measure it Provide the tools to make it practical and tangible Develop leaders who encourage cognitive diversity, facilitate it, and manage it Apply your awareness. of your team's cognitive diversity to think differently about stubborn challenges and tough problems

      [[Cognitive Diversity]]

    1. A few years ago, there was a boom of articles called “If it happened there,” imagining how the American press would cover this-or-that story if it happened in another country. How would we cover the government shutdown if it happened in another country? The Ferguson protests? The Oregon militia siege? George Floyd’s murder? Mike Bloomberg? Slate’s Joshua Keating popularized the form, but other outlets, including Vox, deployed it. The intent was to use the tropes of foreign coverage to create a sense of what the literary critic Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement” — severing us from the familiarity and overconfidence that can dull our awareness of extraordinary events.

      this is an interesting thought experiment

  17. Oct 2020
    1. In order to inform the development and implementation of effective online learning environments, this study was designed to explore both instructors' and students' online learning experiences while enrolled in various online courses. The study investigated what appeared to both support and hinder participants' online teaching and learning experiences.

      The authors discuss the issue of community and engagement in online graduate programs. They carried out a small case study and used a Cognitive Apprenticeship Model to examine a successful program in Higher Education. They found that students feel too many online classes are just reading and writing, regurgitating rather than applying, and lack sufficient connection with the instructor and with other students, They recommend some strategies to fix that, but admit that more work is needed. 9/10

    1. We eventually hope to create affect-sensitive learning environments that respond constructively and effectively to boredom and confusion. When we do, we will have made significant progress towards improving students’ learning experiences, reducing problem behaviors such as gaming the system, managing students’ frustration and confusion in the face of impasses, and ultimately improving students’ learning.

      Researchers studied students cognitive-affective states doing online learning in 3 separate, very different studies, among different student populations, ranging from 12-year-olds to college students. They found that, contrary to prior assumptions, frustration did not necessarily have negative learning outcomes. Boredom tended to last longest of the cognitive-affective states covered, led to the greatest attempts to game the system, and had the least successful learning outcomes. Confusion was sometimes beneficial and sometimes harmful. Therefore, online learning environments should be developed that guard against boredom and perhaps confusion, rather than frustration. 8/10

    1. The stories added meaning that couldn’t be matched by facts and figures about the items for sale. Meaning can be very difficult to pull off in design, but sto-ries create cognitive fluency around meaning. Our minds love narratives because they love patterns; stories are like really well-packaged patterns. Beginning, middle, and end. Connect-ing that pattern to an object or action in your design can be achieved, in part, by making sure your design accommodates story—whether in the metaphorical sense of how the page is structured (i.e., the page has a clear beginning, middle, and end) or the more literal sense of actually making sure the design leaves room for text that tells a story.

      This can also be leveraged to help improve one's memory.

    2. If the original price is horizontally farther away on the page from the sale price (Fig 2.8), the customer is more likely to view it as a better deal, even if the dollar amounts do not change. We equate visual distance with fiscal distance (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-19/).
  18. Sep 2020
    1. cognitive dissonance

      google definition also says, the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

    1. 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.

      If nothing else, this is indicative of human cognitive bias. We'll tend to take at face value what is presented to us, but then once we "know" our confirmation bias will kick in on the other direction.

      I'm curious if there were examples of anyone calling out her accent contemporaneously? We're also stuck with the bias of wanting to go with the majority view. When you're the lone voice, you're less likely to speak up. This is also evinced in the story of her previous colleagues who had "gut feelings" that something was wrong, but didn't say anything or do any research at the time.

    1. loss aversion. We are way more scared of losing what we have than excited about getting something new.
    2. This super-sketchy experiment had one final phase, how-ever: reconciliation. After successive scenarios were deployed where the Rattlers and the Eagles had common goals (unblock-ing a shared water supply, repairing a truck, etc.) they grew closer, even splitting drinks at the end (malts, come on people). In our work, we may not call them Rattlers and Eagles. Instead, we may call them IT and Legal and Marketing. Or “weird-code-name product-team one” versus “weird-code-name product-team two”. But if organizations incentivize based on scarcity and self-interest, we might as well just call it what it is, a scaled version of the Robbers Cave experiment. And to mitigate the siloing and combat ingroup bias, we’ll have to consider following a different approach.

      How can we do this for the democrats and the republicans?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. WEIRD people have a bad habit of universalizing from their own particularities. They think everyone thinks the way they do, and some of them (not all, of course) reinforce that assumption by studying themselves. In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.

      This is a painful reality. It's also even more specific to the current Republican party. Do as we say, not as we do.

      This is the sort of example that David Dylan Thomas will appreciate.

    1. “Motivation conditions cognition,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, wisely told me. Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.
  19. Aug 2020
    1. A fascinating viewpoint on social media, journalism, and information. There are some great implied questions for web designers hiding in here.

    2. In discussing the appeal of the News Feed in that same interview with Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg observed, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The statement is grotesque not because it’s false — it’s completely true — but because it’s a category error. It yokes together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different scale and import. And yet, in his tone-deaf way, Zuckerberg managed to express the reality of content collapse. When it comes to information, social media renders category errors obsolete.

      How can we minimize this sort of bias? How can we help to increase the importance of truly important things?

    1. name-pronunciation effect. And it’s exactly what you would expect. People with names you find easy to pronounce are viewed more favorably than those with names deemed difficult to pronounce, which can lead to pro-motions, votes, and more.
    2. http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-33/

      I've been wondering about what I perceive as a dreadful editorial choice in how these footnote links have been done. Given the book however, I'm also now wondering if this is consciously done by design to provide a blindfold of sorts to prevent bias either for or against these sources.

      Either way I, still wish they were more traditionally done and/or presented. I at least wish I had the added context about them on their respective pages.

    3. The framing effect, which is the bias the above examples exploit, is in my opinion the most dangerous bias in the world.
    4. What if, as in the case of anonymous résumés, the DA had no clue about the race of the accused? For that matter, what if you also removed identifying information on the victim and even the location of the crime? In 2019, the San Francisco DA’s office began anonymous charging, removing potentially biasing information from crime reports DAs use to decide whether or not to bring charges (http://bkaprt.com/dcb/02-30/). It’s too soon to tell the outcome of that experiment but, again, the removal of a decisive element may enhance an experience rather than detract from it.

      Another way to potentially approach this is to take the biasing information and reduce the charging by statistical means to negate the biased effects?

      Separately, how can this be done at the street level to allow policing resources to find and prosecute white collar criminals who may be having a more profoundly deleterious effect on society?

    5. As designers, we’re used to finding clever ways to reveal information to the user. But anonymous résumés challenge us with the notion that sometimes less information can lead to better decisions. We need to find artful ways to conceal infor-mation that might be biasing, even if true.
    6. mere-exposure effect, which occurs when you like something simply because you’ve seen it before. What’s remarkable about this effect is that it works even if you don’t remember seeing the thing before!
    7. you voted for Obama AND Hillary, fer cryin’ out loud!)

      There's some implicit statistical bias here because this likely isn't true for about half of the readership, presuming that they're American in the first place, which is another bias...

    8. we aren’t gullible so much as efficient. We tend to believe things that are easy for our minds to process.
    9. phenomenon known as cognitive fluency—the idea that we translate cognitive ease into actual ease.
    10. Immune neglect describes another failure of affective fore-casting, specifically around predicting our ability to cope with adverse outcomes.
    11. Our memories protect at all costs the idea that we’re good decision-makers.
    12. The interaction has been architected to benefit the grocer. It could just as easily have been architected to benefit the customer by putting the freshest fruit on top.

      There's also another bias going on here. We're biased to buy more when the shelves are heavily stocked, even if a lot of the food will ultimately go bad. So the grocer looses out because they often will sell far less than they stock.

    13. There’s even a bias called the bias blind spot,where you think you’re not biased but you’re sure everybody else is.
    14. We call these errors cognitive biases.

      or maybe even heuristics gone bad....

    15. At worst, they might actively harm them.

      Interesting that I've been listening to a series on behavioral economics this week and there've been a few examples of how to use people's cognitive bias against them.

      It can also be helpful for us to know our own biases so we can prevent people from using them against us as well.

  20. Jul 2020
    1. Många upplever sina största svårigheter i relationer med andra särskilt med de mest nära, kära och intima. Lev livet fullt ut visar oss hur våra relationer kan vara en ingång till ett andligt uppvaknande, om vi använder oss av dem på ett klokt och vist sätt.

      Och här låter det som att den som TÄNKER för mycket behöver balansera det med motsatsen att KÄNNA, vilket man har god nytta av i relationer exempelvis.

      Igen, Carl Jungs typteori. Medicinhjulets väderstreck, elementens eld (tänkande) och dess motsats vatten (känslor)

  21. Jun 2020
    1. In hisCybernetics(1948),Norbert Wiener, a colleague of Bush at MIT, did notrefer to the memex, but its status is easily handled by his dictum that “informationis information, not matter or energy” (Wiener [1948] 1973, 132; also 11–12 for hiscoining the term “cybernetics” from the Greekkuberne, steersman). On this view, ablind man’s cane is part of the cybernetic system that includes the cane, his mind,and his body. InNatural-Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark elaborates on this by affirmingthat a cyborg mind need not sport electro-chemical implants; rather, the brain canhave systemic dependence on, and interaction with, various kinds of external storagedevices (Clark 2003; see also Clark and Chalmers 1998).10

      distributed and/or extended cognition.

  22. May 2020
  23. Apr 2020