EXPERT INTUITION

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

We are not surprised when a two-year-old looks at a dog and says “doggie!” because we are used to the miracle of children learning to recognize and name things. Simon’s point is that the miracles of expert intuition have the same character. Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. Good intuitive judgments come to mind with the same immediacy as “doggie!”

Unfortunately, professionals’ intuitions do not all arise from true expertise.


TOPIC: #Explanations
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

HIGH QUALITY - https://goo.gl/Le2MQ1


#CognitiveBiases

COGNITIVE BIAS CHEAT SHEET

Buster Benson made several different attempts to try to group 20 or so cognitive biases at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address.

Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases

http://telegra.ph/Cognitive-biases-02-27

ILLUSIONS OF TRUTH

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But it was psychologists who discovered that you do not have to repeat the entire statement of a fact or idea to make it appear true. People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a chicken is 144°” (or any other arbitrary number). The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true. If you cannot remember the source of a statement, and have no way to relate it to other things you know, you have no option but to go with the sense of cognitive ease.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

RECIPROCATION*

In social psychology, reciprocity is a social rule that says people should repay, in kind, what another person has provided for them; that is, people give back (reciprocate) the kind of treatment they have received from another. By virtue of the rule of reciprocity, people are obligated to repay favors, gifts, invitations, etc. in the future. If someone receives a gift for their birthday, a reciprocal expectation may influence them to do the same on the gift-giver's birthday. This sense of future obligation associated with reciprocity makes it possible to build continuing relationships and exchanges. Reciprocal actions of this nature are important to social psychology as they can help explain the maintenance of social norms.

A person who violates the reciprocity norm by accepting without attempting to return the good acts of others is disliked by the social group. Individuals who benefit from the group's resources without contributing any skills, helping, or resources of their own are called free riders. Both individuals and social groups often punish free riders, even when this punishment results in considerable costs to the group. Therefore, it is unsurprising that individuals will go to great lengths to avoid being seen as a moocher, freeloader, or ingrate.

The rule enforces uninvited debts and can trigger unfair exchanges.


TOPIC: #Psychology
SOURCE: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

* The subject is related to psychology, but we decided that it would be helpful if you knew it.

HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

Hello everybody,

Today, we want to recommend you to read a very helpful and intresting book: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is an AI researcher, blogger, and exponent of human rationality. And in his book we can see the world of Harry Potter from a position of rationality. Petunia married a biochemist, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction. Then came the Hogwarts letter, and a world of intriguing new possibilities to exploit. And new friends, like Hermione Granger, and Professor McGonagall, and Professor Quirrell.

We share .mobi and .epub formats and the link for the audio book.


TOPIC: #Books

P.S.: IT’S NOT JUST ANOTHER STORY ABOUT HARRY, IT’S REALLY HELPFUL AND SERIOUS LITERATURE

Audio book - https://goo.gl/e3kMdG

THIRD-PERSON EFFECT

A person exposed to a persuasive communication in the mass media sees this as having a greater effect on others than on himself or herself. Each individual reasons: “I will not be influenced, but they (the third persons) may well be persuaded.” In some cases, a communication leads to action not because of its impact on those to whom it is ostensibly directed, but because others (third persons) think that it will have an impact on its audience. Four small experiments that tend to support this hypothesis are presented, and its complementary relationship to a number of concepts in the social sciences is noted.

The third-person effect may help to explain various aspects of social behavior, including the fear of heretical propaganda by religious leaders and the fear of dissent by political rulers. It appears to be related to the phenomenon of censorship in general: the censor never admits to being influenced; it is others with “more impressionable minds” who will be affected.



TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: The Third-Person Effect in Communication by Davison, W. Phillips 1983

TENDENCY TO IGNORING THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING A LARGE SAMPLE SIZE

Suppose this happened to you:

After months of deliberation over a new car purchase, you finally decided to buy the fuel-efficient Ford Focus. You found that both «Consumer Reports» and «Road and Track» magazines gave the Focus a good rating. It is priced within your budget, and you like its “sharp” appearance. On your way out the door to close the deal, you run into a close friend and tell her about your intended purchase. “A Focus!” she shrieks. “My brother-in-law bought one and it’s a tin can. It’s constantly breaking down on the freeway. He’s had it towed so often that the rear tires need replacing.

What do you do?

Most people would have a difficult time completing the purchase because they are insufficiently sensitive to sample size issues. The national magazines presumably tested many cars before they determined their rating. Your friend’s brother-in-law is a single subject. You should place greater confidence in results obtained with large samples than in results obtained with small samples (assuming that the “experiments” were equally good). Yet, many people find the testimonial of a single person, especially if it is someone they know, more persuasive than information gathered from a large sample, especially when there is preference for the results obtained from the small sample.

We tend to ignore the importance of having an adequately large sample size when we function as intuitive scientists.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thought and knowledge: an introduction to critical thinking by Diane F. Halpern

HOW OUR BRAIN WORKS

Our brains are comprised of two characters, one that thinks fast, System 1, and one that thinks slow, System 2.

System 1 operates automatically, intuitively, involuntary, and effortlessly—like when we drive, read an angry facial expression, or recall our age.

System 2 requires slowing down, deliberating, solving problems, reasoning, computing, focusing, concentrating, considering other data, and not jumping to quick conclusions— like when we calculate a math problem, choose where to invest money, or fill out a complicated form. These two systems often conflict with one another.

The following video explains how our brain works https://goo.gl/nroMO4



TOPIC: #Explanations
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

REPRESENTATIVENESS

Similar to profiling or stereotyping, “representativeness” is the intuitive leap to make judgments based on how similar something is to something we like without taking into consideration other factors: probability (likelihood), statistics (base rate), or sampling sizes.

Baseball scouts used to recruit players based on how close their appearance resembled other good players. Once players were recruited based on actual statistics the level of gamesmanship improved. Just because we like the design of a book cover doesn’t mean we’ll like the contents. You can’t judge a book by its cover. A start-up restaurant has a low chance of survival regardless of how much you like their food. Many well run companies keep their facilities neat and tidy but a well kept lawn is no guarantee that the occupants inside are organized.

To discipline our lazy intuition we must make judgments based on probability and base rates, and question our analysis of the evidence used to come up with our assumption in the first place. Potential for error: Evaluating a person, place, or thing on how much it resembles something else without taking into account other salient factors.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

ILLUSIONS OF REMEMBERING

The word illusion brings visual illusions to mind, because we are all familiar with pictures that mislead. But vision is not the only domain of illusions; memory is also susceptible to them, as is thinking more generally.

David Stenbill, Monica Bigoutski, Sh"imight=s is pictana Tirana. I just made up these names. If you encounter any of them within the next few minutes you are likely to remember where you saw them. You know, and will know for a while, that these are not the names of minor celebrities. But suppose that a few days from now you are shown a long list of names, including some minor celebrities and “new” names of people that you have never heard of; your task will be to check every name of a celebrity in the list. There is a substantial probability that you will identify David Stenbill as a well-known person, although you will not (of course) know whether you encountered his name in the context of movies, sports, or politics. Larry Jacoby, the psychologist who first demonstrated this memory illusion in the laboratory, noscriptd his article “Becoming Famous Overnight.” How does this happen? Start by asking yourself how you know whether or not someone is famous. In some cases of truly famous people (or of celebrities in an area you follow), you have a mental file with rich information about a person— think Albert Einstein, Bono, Hillary Clinton. But you will have no file of information about David Stenbill if you encounter his name in a few days. All you will have is a sense of familiarity—you have seen this name somewhere.

Jacoby nicely stated the problem: “The experience of familiarity has a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience.” This quality of pastness is an illusion. The truth is, as Jacoby and many followers have shown, that the name David Stenbill will look familiar when you see it because you will see it more clearly. Words that you have seen before become easier to see again—you can identify them better than other words when they are shown very briefly or masked by noise, and you will be quicker (by a few hundredths of a second) to read them than to read other words. In short, you experience greater cognitive ease in perceiving a word you have seen earlier, and it is this sense of ease that gives you the impression of familiarity.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

HALO EFFECT

If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person , including things you have not observed, is known as the halo effect. It is one of the ways the representation of the world that System 1( about system 1 and system 2 look here ) generates is simpler and more coherent than the real thing.

Fore example: You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan’s generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And now that you believe she is generous, you probably like Joan even better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes.

Real evidence of generosity is missing in the story of Joan, and the gap is filled by a guess that fits one’s emotional response to her. In other situations, evidence accumulates gradually and the interpretation is shaped by the emotion attached to the first impression.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

MIDDLE GROUND

You claimed that a compromise, or middle point, between two extremes must be the truth.

Much of the time the truth does indeed lie between two extreme points, but this can bias our thinking: sometimes a thing is simply untrue and a compromise of it is also untrue. Half way between truth and a lie, is still a lie.

Example: Holly said that vaccinations caused autism in children, but her scientifically well-read friend Caleb said that this claim had been debunked and proven false. Their friend Alice offered a compromise that vaccinations must cause some autism, just not all autism.


TOPIC: #LogicalFallacy
SOURCE: yourlogicalfallacyis.com

THE GAMBLER'S FALLACY

You said that 'runs' occur to statistically independent phenomena such as roulette wheel spins.

This commonly believed fallacy can be said to have helped create an entire city in the desert of Nevada USA. Though the overall odds of a 'big run' happening may be low, each spin of the wheel is itself entirely independent from the last. So whilst there may be a very small chance that heads will come up 20 times in a row if you flip a coin, the chances of heads coming up on each individual flip remain 50/50, and aren't influenced by what happened before.

Example: Red had come up six times in a row on the roulette wheel, so Greg knew that it was close to certain that black would be next up. Suffering an economic form of natural selection with this thinking, he soon lost all of his savings.


TOPIC: #LogicalFallacy
SOURCE: yourlogicalfallacyis.com

FRAMING WITH LEADING QUESTIONS AND NEGATION

Framing occurs when a question is asked is a way that suggests what the correct response should be. The reader is “led” into assuming a particular perspective or point of view.

Consider the following problem:

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
"If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved. Which of the two programs would you favor? "
Now consider the same problem, and select between the following two programs:
"If Program C is adopted, 400 people will die. If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die. Which of these two programs would you favor?"

When this problem was presented to college students, 72% of those given the first set of choices selected Program A, while 78% of those given the second set of choices selected Program D. Look closely at the choices. Program A and C are effectively identical—they differ only in that A is described in terms of the numbers of lives saved, while C is described in terms of the number who will die. Program B and D are also identical, differing only in the language used to describe the outcomes. It seems that most people are risk adverse, which means that they prefer options that do not involve loss. When an alternative makes a potential loss prominent (e.g., focuses on the number that die), people will reject that alternative. It is clear that when an option is stated in terms of a loss, it is judged more negatively than a mathematically identical statement about gains. This is an important result, showing that human judgments and preferences can be readily manipulated by changes in the way questions are asked or framed. If I tell you that a new medical treatment has a 50% success rate you will be more likely to endorse its use than if I tell you that it has a 50% failure rate. The only difference is whether the information was presented in a positive (success rate) frame or a negative (failure rate) frame.

Framing can be used to influence thinking in many different contexts, so its effects can be powerful. If you understand how they work, you can use framing to your advantage and recognize when others are using it to their advantage. Suppose you are interviewing for a job and you have gotten to the “sticky” issue of negotiating salary. If you said to the prospective employer that you really wanted $50,000 a year, but you are willing to take $45,000, the employer begins to see this offer as a gain of $5000. Similarly, if the prospective employer were to say that she was ready to offer $40,000 but is willing to go as high as $45,000 (after all you studied critical thinking and should be worth more salary), then you would have the “feeling” of having gained $5000.


TOPIC: #CognitiveBiases
SOURCE: Thought and knowledge: an introduction to critical thinking by Diane F. Halpern

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