Do you love to say "I told you so!"?
Do you like to make predictions and forget when you were wrong but boast about the ones you were right about?
Do you have beliefs about what politician or political party is better, global warming, what can you achieve ( or not ) in this world, how much people like you ( or don't) and feel that you are RIGHT?
Well: bad news! You suffer from confirmation biases.
GOOD NEWS: WE ALL DO!
( "relative good news" maybe?)
So what is this confirmation bias I talk about?!?
From Wikipedia:
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.
You see, the human mind is a very faulty machine that produces countless biases and misfires. The spookiest thing is that you don't even know. I know I don't! I walk around thinking I'm in control of my thoughts and actions and using my "rationality!" to deal with situations in the best possible way I can. No way my brain is fooling me into thinking this.
Oh wait! It totally does.
I recommend reading [this article[(https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLm9mgJRPvmPGpo7Q/the-cognitive-science-of-rationality) as it's a great introduction to all this if you did not read much about it so far. Then "Predictably irrational" book is a MUST in my opinion.
Anyway, what happens is that we love to be right!
I was reading an article today about an issue and I was very much in agreement with whatever that person was saying. Oh yes, I think so too! Oh yeah, mmm, so I am right! At the end of the article I was ready to ninja-send it to all my friends and enemies with a subtitle of "AHA!!" and a very satisfied grin emoji. Then I stopped.
Oh fuck! My confirmation bias is flaring up. Seriously, the sweet music of being content with myself is so alluring, a siren call to abandon all rationality and just munch on this sweet sweet nectar of "being right". Seriously, articles like those are like crack-cocaine for me.
Well, time to do the opposite and read some stupid comments that disagree with the article and a few articles that disagree with the author and see what happens.
A simple instruction to "think about alternatives" can promote resistance to overconfidence and confirmation bias. In one study, subjects asked to generate their own hypotheses are more responsive to their accuracy than subjects asked to choose from among pre-picked hypotheses.16 Another study required subjects to list reasons for and against each of the possible answers to each question on a quiz prior to choosing an answer and assessing the probability of its being correct. This process resulted in more accurate confidence judgments relative to a control group.17
It seems that it's a good strategy! Now this doesn't mean that you are never right or that whenever you are right you are fooling yourself. But you need to trust yourself a little less than you are ready to do.
And remember when something confirms too many of your beliefs, you're probably editing stuff out.
Take the blindfold of..or just munch on the NECTAR. That's an option to!
