In some ways similar to selection bias, confirmation bias is the tendency for people to favour information that agrees with their preconceptions or beliefs, regardless of whether it is actually true.
Confirmation bias is an example of a cognitive bias, a human trait, whereas selection bias is typically a methodological error in a scientific study. The results can be similar: evidence against some hypothesis can be suppressed while evidence for it is overemphasized. However, with selection bias the emphasis depends on the selection error that is made, while confirmation bias the emphasis lies with whatever the person’s existing beliefs are, effectively in favour of they would like to be true.
There are many mistakes one can make when setting up a scientific study. Awareness of such mistakes and biases is very important so that we can avoid drawing false conclusions from bad data. Today I’m briefly introducing selection bias.
Today I again stumbled on an old article I bookmarked/miniblogged on November 6, 2008 (two days after Obama won the election). Titled The American void, Simon Critchley wrote about the role of belief and faith in Obama’s worldview, and the nature of his conversion to Christianity. It was the musings on the “anthropologist’s distance” that really caught my attention back then.
What I want to touch on in this post is what is discussed in this paragraph:
Why do we need religion? Obama recognizes that people turn to religion because they want “a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toil of daily life.” The alternative is clear: nihilism. The latter means “to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.” Religion satisfies the need for a fullness to experience, a transcendence that fills the void. Obama’s path to Christianity plays out against the background of his anthropologist mother’s respectful distance from religion.
It connects with a previous post of mine, Our Narratives.
How do you think about the future? How does the past influence you? Do you live “in the moment”, is that something to strive towards?
Dr. Philip Zimbardo gave a talk at RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about time perspectives. He discusses past orientated, present orientated and future orientated perspectives (and two of each), and the impact these perspectives have on how we live our lives. The talk is 41 minutes long, but RSA also posted a 10 minute condensed version. The condensed version is sufficient to give an overview, get those mental cogs turning, and maybe kickstart a conversation. Take a look:
In Many Faiths, One Truth, an op-ed in the NY Times, the Dalai Lama (a Buddhist leader of religious officials of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism) calls for religious tolerance, for finding common ground among faiths, bridging needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever.
I couldn’t agree more. I think pluralism is the only way forward. Rather let me rephrase, it is an essential ingredient in our way forward. I easily become a fan of any religious leader that persistently encourages openness to the good found in traditions not their own.
Let me not detract from the article with further commentary just yet. Go read it.
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Approximately September last year I stumbled upon a particular app in the Android market: a Tao Te Ching app by Barclay Osborn. It contains the original Chinese and three public domain translations (specifically: a translation from 1891 by James Legges, D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus’ 1913 translation and Dwight Goddard and Henri Borels’ 1919 translation). There is another Tao Te Ching app on the Android market, but I don’t like the one translation it has.
I had heard of the Tao Te Ching before and read some extracts here and there. However, it was only after reading the first three chapters in these parallel translations that my curiosity really got piqued, and I decided I want to blog my way through it. It consists of only 81 “chapters”, with each chapter typically having only two to five paragraphs, with just a couple going up to about eight. The challenging part will be grappling with multiple translations in order to try to get a better understanding of the layers in the original poetic Chinese.
We are a story telling species. Our culture and our minds developed around the stories we told, the narratives we weaved. And they weren’t just narratives on some big screen that we watched for two hours, and then walked out and continued with “real life”. Our narratives were woven into our lives. And still are.
In modern times we got quite serious about separating fact from fiction. “Those are just stories. This is reality, the facts, real life. Don’t go confusing the two. Get real, you’re not living in a movie.”
But of course we are. We weave ourselves narratives about our own lives. Our ambitions and dreams for our fictionalised futures are narratives we dream up for ourselves. Our present doesn’t always follow the plot, but still, around it we are also weaving a narrative, part storyteller, part audience, but how we choose to interpret events carries much weight. Our past provides back story on which to draw to weave both our interpretations of the present, and our dreams and plot line for the future. And many sources of inspiration from which to steal ideas.
I’m going to more consciously throw myself into a narrative, let it be a source of courage, a rudder for steering the ship, enabling the sails to catch ambition. Though the plot may often get lost, though the genre may be unknown, though the critics might label the book “absurdist” and end with the police arresting the medieval nuts and putting an end to the filming, if you’re not at least pointing in some direction, you’ve got no incentive to catch the wind.
This is a rerun of Community Meta-Guidelines with one word replaced — which do you prefer? Which word should I run with, or should I simply use both at once?
Meta:
In epistemology, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). Similarly, metamemory in psychology means an individual’s knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it.
Thus here follows some “guidelines” about the tribal guidelines. Yes, there aren’t guidelines yet, other than those floating around in my head, but I’ll start sharing them this week.
Rather let me rephrase, it is an essential ingredient in our way forward. I easily become a fan of any religious leader that persistently encourages openness to the good found in traditions not their own.
Selection Bias:
Why I Cannot Join Shofar:
AtA: Are Cats Evil?:
Dutch-Reformed Homosexuality: