Posts Tagged ‘Rolf Dobelli’
Fallacies, Biases, Illusions, effects, trendencies, errors… and “The Art of Thinking Clear”
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 7, 2014
Fallacies, Biases, Illusions, effects, trendencies, errors… and “The Art of Thinking Clear”
By Rolf Dobelli
This book is a simple guide to “less irrational” behaviors and tendencies, as we get aware of the hundreds of biases that are ingrained in our behaviors.
I have reviewed two dozen of these 99 listed biases and added my comments.
“It isn’t what we know that gets in our way. It is what we believe” Physicist Harold Puthoff
“We’d rather be roughly right than precisely right” Lord Keynes
“Faced with the choice between changing our mind and proving there is no need to do so, everyone gets busy on the proof” (John Kenneth Galbraith)
1. Survivorship Bias
2. Swimmer’s body illusion
3. Clustering illusion
4. Social proof effect
5. Sunk cost effect
6. Reciprocity
7. Confirmation
8. Authority
9. Contrast effect
10. Availability
11. Getting worse before getting better fallacy
12. Story bias
13. In hindsight illusion
14. Overconfidence bias
15. Chauffeur knowledge
16. Illusion of control
17. Insensitive Super-Response tendency
18. Regression to mean fallacy
19. Outcome bias
20. Paradox of choice
21. Liking bias
22. Endowment effect
23. Coincidence fallacy
24. Group think effect
25. Neglect of Probability
26. Scarcity Error
27. Base-rate neglect
28. Gambler’s fallacy
29. The Anchor
30. Induction
31. Loss aversion
32. Social loafing
33. Exponential growth
34. Winner’s curse
35. Fundamental attribution error
36 False causality
37. Halo effect
38. Alternative path
39. Forecast illusion
40. Conjunction fallacy
41. Framing
42. Action bias
43. Omission bias
44. Self-serving
45. Hedonic treadmill
46. Sel-selection bia
47. Beginner’s luck
48. Cognitive dissonance
49. Hyperbolic discounting
50. Because Justification
51. Decision fatigue
52. Contagion bias
53. Problems with averages
54. Motivation crowding
55. Twaddle tendency
56. Will Roger phenomenon
57. Information bias
58. Effort justification
59. Law of small numbers
60. Expectations
61. Simple logic fallacy
62. Forer effect
63. Volunteer’s folly
64. Affect heuristic
65 Introspection illusion
66. Inability to close doors
67. Neomania
68. Sleeper effect
69. Alternative blindness
70. Social comparison
71. Primacy and recency effects
72. “Not invented here” syndrome
73. The Black Swan
74. Domain Dependence
75. False-Consensus
76. Falsification of History bias
77. In-group, out-group biases
78. Ambiguity aversion
79. Default, standard option effects
80. Fear of regret
81. Salience effect
82. House-Money effect
83. Procrastination
84. Envy vs jealousy
85. Personification
86. Illusion of paying attention
87. Planning fallacy
88. Zeigarnik effect
89. Illusion of skills
90. Feature=positive effect
91. Cherry picking tendency
92. Single cause fallacy
93 Intention to treat errors
94. News illusion
Note 1: As you read these 100 tendencies to commit errors of judgment, try to add other systematic biases to the list
Try to add a title or a short statement that succinctly describe the topic.
Note 2: The exigencies of living lead us to stick to most of our biases and fallacies. We tend to procrastinate acting on our well-intentioned decisions that could correct our ill-conceived methodology to run our life.
Note 3: To better comprehend these types of behavioral errors or shortcomings, the best way is to try various taxonomies (categorizing) for these biases, fallacies… that lead to errors
1. You may define these terms and delimit how they differ and sort them accordingly
2. You may sort them according to cognitive, social, evolutionary perspectives
3. Sort them according to your field of interest so that you rely on a shorter list when reviewing failed projects and erasing the biases that were taken care of.
4. Group them for correlation or seemingly contradictory behaviors
As in any selection: Beauty and body are the main factors. And the Aptitude traits
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 28, 2014
As in any selection: Beauty and body are the main factors. The Aptitude traits
Model-like women are selected because they were born attractive and tall. It is never the cosmetics that made them attractive. All the cosmetics cannot help before or after selection.
It is the swimmer body, slim, streamlined and attractively built, that made them be selected, including big and large feet and hands for displacing more water. Swimmers were selected because they exhibited the kinds of bodies most readily performing with training.
Taking swimming as a hobby to render your body attractive will not do: Though it is a better sport to keep fit.
I’m talking of when you are young. As the years go by, it is how you take care of your health and how you keep your mind agile that aid you in your activities.
Without the illusion of confounding selection factors with results, most advertising companies would falter.
Is Harvard a good university?
Somehow, historically, the elite and rich classes sent their children to top selected universities and institutions.
These institutions could afford to have the most rigorous programs for selecting applicants according to the mental aptitude They enjoyed plenty of funding from state and private rich donors.
It is this rigorous selection process favoring students with high aptitude levels and the strength character to withstand rigorous programs that graduate top smart people.
Mind you that the IQ scores for the bottom tier of selected student in top universities are higher than the top tier students in normal university.
And yet, these bottom tier fail to graduate while the top tier in normal university become successful people: The Big Fish in Small Pond paradox.
When you are competing with highly smart people and starting to collect B minus, grades that you have never received in high school, it dawn on you to drop out and move to normal universities where effective interactions with classmates are possible.
Generally, the MBA graduates from the top institutions exhibit a wide gap in earning income compared to non-graduates. This gap has nothing to do with the MBA programs or what students learn:
Those who insist on investing big to attend an MBA program are already the achievers who could have made it anyway.
Cheerfulness, a trait shared by people who see a half full glass, is largely a personality trait that remains constant throughout life.
“Try to be happy is as futile as trying to be taller”
Do you know of an unhappy person writing a “self help” book? (About their failures and unhappiness?)
Can you be honest about what you see in the mirror?
Would what you see be “selection material”?
Best, rely on outside observers to tell you what you are blind to,
More probably, it is the reaction of other people that give you the proper hints about you aptitudes.
If not a selection material, forget selection tests and tedious processes that are meant to humiliate, and plug on with what life best offers to you.
Read: “The Art of Thinking Clear” by Rolf Dobelli
Is your volunteering work plainly a folly?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 22, 2014
- In: Book Review | economy/finance | Essays | humor | social articles
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Is your volunteering work plainly a folly?
Suppose you are a professional and earning $300 per hour doing your work.
For example, a consultant of some kind, a photographer, a lawyer, a physician…
If you are a celebrity, showing up to a fund raising event that you are passionate about, your volunteering of time is a great move for publicity.
Otherwise, why volunteer your “precious time” to build birdhouses for endangered species if you have no carpentry skills?
With what you earn per hour, you can easily hire 6 professional carpenters who will produce dozens of well built birdhouses, instead of the lousy one you might be able to pull through
If you feel like volunteering time and effort, consider the jobs as a break in your routine life-style, from the tedious demands in your profession, a day of vacation to relax…
Volunteer folly does not correspond to volunteer work that may increase your skills and enlarge the sphere of your contacts…
Just don’t fall for these follies that corporate abuse new graduates to exploit their skills and talents for peanuts.
Many young people keep volunteering their time with Red Cross, Scout movement… way after they graduated instead of focusing on their career.
I guess this impulse of staying in close contact with the “tribe” is a mighty factor: we are unable to break free from our emotions and feeling secure.
Note: Read Rolf Dobelli’s (The Art of thinking clear)
Do read your personality traits:
“1. You have a need for other people to like and admire you
2. You have this tendency to be critical of yourself
3. You have unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage
4. You have a few personality weakness, but you are able to compensate for them
5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problem for you
6. You are disciplined and have self-control on the outside, but you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside
7. Occasionally, you have serious doubts that you made the right decisions or done the right thing
8. You prefer a certain amount of change and varieties
9. You become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations
10. You pride yourself as an independent thinker
11. More often than not, you do not accept others’ statement without satisfactory proof
12. You realized that it is unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to other on many occasions
13. There are periods and times when you feel to be an extrovert, affable and sociable
14 other times, you feel an introvert, wary and reserved
15. A few of your aspirations are pretty unrealistic
16. Security is very high on your list of goals in life”
On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being highly accurate, you rated my evaluation as a 4 or 5.
You are not one of the rare people to rank what you read as a 5. Everyone ranked this text as 4 or 5. Why?
1, The statements are general in nature. No specificity involved.
2. Many statements are flattering
3. No negative statement in the text: This is the “feature-positive effect” at play
4. We accept whatever corresponds to our self-image and filter out everything else: this is the “confirmation bias” effect
Astrology, astro-therapy, handwriting analysis, biorhythm analysis, palmistry, tarot card readings, sessions with the dead, reading coffee grinds…
All these charlatan of pseudosciences that work well by applying the 4 behaviors common to us all, ingrained in our unconscious and permitting us to function in our daily life.
Note: The text was crafted by psychologist Bertram Forer in 1948 and used to coin the Forer Effect or Barnum Effect.
A chapter in Rolf Dobelli “The Art of thinking clearly”
“Social Proof Bias”? How this bias is still valid for our survival?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 13, 2014
“Social Proof Bias”? How this bias still stand for our survival?
Even a couple centuries ago, it was a survival instinct to cling to the masses: this social instinct gave comfort of being safe from “attacking” enemy or climatic upheavals.
It was safety that made people conglomerate in communities, way before the added values in production and trading goods.
Following the crowd is becoming a dangerous reaction inheritance. What of frequent stampede accidents.
Except for famine plagued regions where it is of great importance to follow the fleeing hordes to UN camps?
Or when in a foreign city and have tickets for a stadium event.
Somerset Maugham wrote: “If 50 million people say something foolish, it is still foolish”
In capitalist systems and uncontrolled financial companies in the hands of the few 1% elite class, social proof bias is the evil behind bubbles and stock market panic.
Social proof bias exists in fashion, management techniques, hobbies, religion and diets, to mention a few fields.
It can paralyze entire cultures in times of upheaval and periods of uncertainty, (such as sects committing collective suicide, or extremist religious movements, Fukushima nuclear melt down…)
Peer pressure warps common sense, a reaction to a survival strategy.
Suppose the fire alarm goes off. How the crowd will exit? Would they select the exit closest to the alarm or the opposite exit?
Logically, the fire sensor detect the closest point of fire. And yet, people would rush toward the exit of the alarm.
This social proof bias was mentioned and explained in “The Art of thinking clear” by Rolf Dobelli
