Cognitive Biases

In a vacuum, appealing to authority is fallacious. An idea must stand up on its own merits.

IRL, things get fuzzy. No one has the expertise and time to derive everything from first principles and redo every experiment ever performed. Thus we sadly have to have some level of trust in people.

not all bias is made equal or always something negative. Sometimes it's good to be biased towards the opinion of a scientist over the opinion of your aunt.

Well most people will choose a politician or actor instead of unknown Nobel prize winner. That's how we got here.

I guess authority bias is most absurd when one tries to use it as a crutch to validate an argument.

You should believe me simply because 'x' researcher said this about the topic

Controversial in the sense that it can be easily applied to anyone. There is some substance to the idea that a person can trick themselves into thinking they know more based on limited info. A lot of these biases are like that, they aren't cut and dry but more of an gray area where people can be fooled in various ways. Critical thinking is hard even if it's taught, and it's not taught well enough or at all.

And all of that is my opinion and falls into various biases, but oh well. The easiest person to fool is yourself because we are hardwired in our brain to want to be right, with rewards to ourselves when we find things that help confirm it even if the evidence is not valid. I think the best way to try and avoid the pitfalls is to always back up your claim with something. I've found myself often(!) erasing a response to someone because what I was going to reply didn't have the data that I thought it did and I couldn't show I was correct after I dug a bit to find something.

I almost deleted this for the very reason, but I want to see how it hits. I feel that knowing there's a lot of biases that anyone can fall into can help form better reasoning and argument.

What bias would that fall under? One could assume the variation has to do with the average American's trust of law enforcement vs their trust of a qualified person.

(Assuming the repeat experiments were done in the US that is)

but how will other redditors know how smart I am if i dont regurgitate what i read on reddit

Confirmation bias bias

Probably... Selection bias?

Survivorship bias?

Same for not standing up in the middle of everyone to go out from watching a bad movie in the cinema.

Knowing these helps with self-talk. You trip over a curb and start scolding yourself. Then you can say to yourself "this is just spotlight bias", and move on with your day, avoiding the impact of negative emotions. Or, you might be more open to a change in restaurant plans because you know of the false consensus effect. There's subtle but real power in just naming things!

a senate seat.

a pair of human pants and a human burrito with meat

Oh ffs it gets worse with the Don’t Forget To Like And Subscribe whine beg plead for internet fart points at the bottom

Someone call the mods!

theirs knoe mods here,

OP doesn't fall for the bandwagon effect

I'd say a lot of those things are the result of cognitive shortcuts.

It kinda makes sense to make a lot if not most decisions by relying of such shortcuts (hands up anybody who whilst not having a skin problem will seek peer-reviewed studies when chosing what kind of soap to buy) because they reduce the time and energy expediture, sometimes massivelly so.

Personally I try to "balance" shortcuts vs actual research (in a day to day sense, rather than Research) by making the research effort I will put into a purchase proportional to the price of the item in question (and also taking in account the downsides of a missjudgement: a cheap bungee-jumping rope is still well worth the research) - I'll invest more or less time into evaluationg it and seeking independent evaluations on it depending on how many days of work it will take to be able to afford it - it's not really worth spending hours researching something worth what you earn in 10 minutes of your work if the only downside is that you lose that money but it's well worth investing days into researching it when you're buying a brand new car or a house.

I saw the original first. I like brotherhood better. Both have their merits. Hope that helps :)

I'd argue that's the outcome or survivorship bias, where people focus on the one winner or that time a thing worked and ignoring all the other failures. E.g. people think investors all swim in money because they only see the warren buffets of the world, when in reality there's thousands, millions of people who tried the almost exact same thing and lost some or all of their savings in bad investments.

Absolutely! It's called the Pollyanna Principle. In fact, there's a counterpart to all of these biases that are immensely helpful in certain types of therapy.

Yes, but you cut your losses. No need to waste your time too after wasting money on the ticket.