We Notice When Something Has Changed

November 7, 2021 1:46 PM

T H E C O G N I T I V E B I A S C O D E X
posted by chavenet (41 comments total)

Heuristics...
posted by jim in austin at 1:59 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Change Blindness
posted by srboisvert at 2:10 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I saw the gorilla.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:36 PM on November 7, 2021 [9 favorites]

I have no idea what I’m looking at.
But, I saw it.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:44 PM on November 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

confirms me in my belief that I am generally confused
posted by philip-random at 3:05 PM on November 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

E U R O P E !
posted by kfholy at 3:10 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I liked that there was a whole section for "Too Much Information" as if it wasn't a useful category for the gabillions of links.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:16 PM on November 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

I have a framed print of this! Would be great to maybe link to the artist-scientist’s site in the FPP, iirc they had written a blog post around this too. I’d find it but I’m on a phone and it’s late here.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:42 PM on November 7, 2021 [8 favorites]

Worst Wheel of Fortune relaunch ever
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:50 PM on November 7, 2021 [10 favorites]

Maybe this is the print, and maybe this is the blog post?
posted by box at 3:51 PM on November 7, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is a great find.
posted by JHarris at 3:57 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Pareidolia
posted by sammyo at 4:19 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Years ago I was at a meeting - the kind of meeting you're not supposed to describe in too much detail afterwards - and started to explain that despite the promises of behavioral modeling, it's challenging to a priori predict a specific person's decisions because there are so many possible biases at play. An Important Person (the kind you're not supposed to describe in too much detail afterwards) told me to write down those biases on the room's white board during the 5 minute session break. All I could think of was Bart at the chalkboard during the Simpsons opening credits, and I burst out laughing before I could stop myself. I was alone in my amusement. To try and save face, I emailed the picture version of this codex to everyone. The room did get slightly less icy, but I haven't been asked to join any more of those kinds of meetings.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 4:22 PM on November 7, 2021 [23 favorites]

This is incredibly useful to have organized like this. Thanks for posting it!
posted by subocoyne at 5:00 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

For what it’s worth, if you write “pareidolia” in all lowercase letters, it looks kind of like a person taking a nap.

(I love that the linked article on pareidolia includes the Nashville “nun bun,” which I happened to see early in its tenure, in a little shrine at the Bongo Java where it was not-eaten. Mother Teresa herself had learned about her resemblance to this pastry, and had written the cafe a letter saying “please stop displaying this vulgar thing.” The cafe framed the letter and added it to the shrine.)
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:07 PM on November 7, 2021 [12 favorites]

I mistyped 'cognitive bass' in search and got this. So that's enough internet for me for today.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:18 PM on November 7, 2021 [8 favorites]

To me, the inkblot on the page sammyo linked to looks like two Santas hanging off either side of a Vespa, free arms held out proudly, as if they were part of a stunt display team. Make of that what you will.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:50 PM on November 7, 2021 [9 favorites]

Someone called?

Or, is this something I've imagined?
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 7:08 PM on November 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Omg Greg_Ace, that is exactly what that image is.
posted by sammyo at 8:14 PM on November 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

To me, the inkblot on the page sammyo linked to looks like two Santas hanging off either side of a Vespa, free arms held out proudly, as if they were part of a stunt display team. Make of that what you will.

Oh, hey, you have a number of messages. Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, and Carl Sagan all need to speak with you, and for someone calling themselves Shooter Tipps is waiting for you in there.
posted by hippybear at 8:16 PM on November 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

Is there a name for the cognitive bias of using an incorrect cognitive bias to dismiss an argument ?

I often encounter people who incorrectly label an argument with a cognitive bias that doesn't apply ( e.g. dismissing a climate-change argument based on data provided by NASA, who operate climate sensing satellites, as being an "appeal to authority" ).
posted by knoxg at 8:19 PM on November 7, 2021 [10 favorites]

Is there a name for the cognitive bias of using an incorrect cognitive bias to dismiss an argument ?

I'd put that somewhere in the neighborhood of dismissing complicating information in order to simplify the world to make it easier to deal with, which is largely dealt with in the "Not Enough Information" quadrant.
posted by hippybear at 8:25 PM on November 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

Oh, hey, you have a number of messages. Freud, Jung, Kierkegaard, and Carl Sagan all need to speak with you, and for someone calling themselves Shooter Tipps is waiting for you in there.

Tell Freud, Jung, and Kierkegaard to go philosophize up a rope. Sagan has already left me billyuns and billyuns of messages, dude can't take a hint. Oh - and let Shooter know I'll be at the Two Santas Saloon, I'm buying the first round.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:49 PM on November 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

When I look at the Two Santas inkblot, all I can see is Tim Conway's Siamese elephants.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:11 PM on November 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

Seeing Occam’s Razor on there gave me pause because it’s not a cognitive bias in the normal sense.
posted by borges at 9:26 PM on November 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

cauliflower?
posted by clavdivs at 11:53 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's not Santas on a Vespa -- the inkblot looks like a Wile E Coyote (Super Genius) mugshot.

But don't mind me. I can't watch people having sex (i.e. porn) because it all looks like inkblots.
posted by zaixfeep at 12:10 AM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

definitely, definitely two people wearing belted robes and lucha libre masks kissing each other face to face while two Chihuahua pups on either side play tug of war with them, trying to pull them apart. Clear as day.
posted by taz at 12:11 AM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Regarding Occam's Razor as a cognitive bias, it also gave me pause, but thinking about it a bit more it seems most of these biases spring largely from a need to manage cognitive resources. Occam's razor is at its core a preference for simplicity, and is essential to science because experimental data are always finite and hence cannot falsify an unlimited collection of hypothesises - it's a way to prevent what AI people would call overfitting.
Thinking in those terms, cognitive biases are a result of a meta-optimisation of cognition for lowest cognitive effort (which remember is real metabolic and temporal cost) to achieve an acceptable results most often. AI is not yet anywhere near as good as actual humans at learning efficiency - children don't need hundreds of gigabytes of text to learn to write, or millions of images of boats to recognise a boat.
It's good to recognise our biases, but in this light I'm skeptical that much can be done - the way we understand the world is fundamentally limited by our finite cognitive substrate, or to put another way, people are just people...
posted by memetoclast at 12:27 AM on November 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I thought it was two Pikachus fighting over a beetle.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:51 AM on November 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Greg_Ace Thank you!! Your comment took me straight back to high school in the early '80s, grade 9 science, watching Carl Sagan spin slowly in profile...
posted by lulu68 at 2:45 AM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

1. Why is this a "codex" rather than a "list"?
2. What is the cognitive bias where using a fancy name for something makes people think it's important?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:20 AM on November 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

From my quick googling, apparently while a codex is usually an ancient manuscript bound in a manner that antedates scrolls but predates modern book-binding, it can also (in archaic usage) refer to a list (but most specifically a list of laws, eg. a code of laws, although the etymology of ‘codex’ doesn’t come from ‘code’ but rather from something about a block of wood?). But this circle has perhaps a bit more visual organization than your typical list? (Unless the edges of each section aren’t meant to overlap with the neighbouring categories, in which case it’s a completely superfluous display format that suggests more structure than it actually has?) Anyway, while “list” may or may not be the correct description,, I think the question of what makes it a “codex” is still quite valid.
posted by eviemath at 4:30 AM on November 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

What is the cognitive bias where using a fancy name for something makes people think it's important?

Definitely somewhere in the “overconfidence” cluster on the bottom-left.

My father and I both suffer from what my mother calls “deep voice syndrome.” The symptom is that we speculate on a topic about which we know very little, but we do that speculation in declarative sentences. Other people in the room hear a deep voice speaking in declarative sentences and believe we are speaking with knowledge that we don’t have. An educated (or uneducated) guess rapidly becomes a “fact.”

I am careful to use a lot of “maybe”s and “if”s to fight my deep voice syndrome —— to the extent that my teenage daughter gets annoyed because I almost never give a straight answer to a “simple” question.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:50 AM on November 8, 2021 [15 favorites]

Is there a cognitive bias that explains me not wanting to spend too much go over this page because I'm afraid that the ghost of a long dead child will pop up and scream?
posted by NoMich at 5:00 AM on November 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

There may be something to the tact one could take when this subject arises, where people eager to use cudgels like the ones in the image and concepts like Dunning-Kruger effect to ‘gotcha!’ people they disagree with can instead decide to… not do so. I ‘think out loud’ and lack confidence to convince myself I’m not falling into traps or blind spots for many topics, so I just continuously leave the jury out for them all, saves face later. (Could be the decades of marriage talking, though.)
I’m somewhat surprised nobody’s brought up Thinking Fast and Slow, although it’s probably nearby to the degrees of separation one would hit when branching off from the OP’s image. Like how I feel like there’s a more convincingly illustrative musical theory visualization that I just haven’t found yet, that book takes a fair amount of work to absorb lessons from, but it’s still worth it.
posted by allisterb at 5:34 AM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

( e.g. dismissing a climate-change argument based on data provided by NASA, who operate climate sensing satellites, as being an "appeal to authority" ).

sometime before Covid-19, I was witness to two neighbours discussing vaccine issues. The younger, who was in university at the time, said something like, "But if you actually take the time to look into the science ..."

At which point the older cut him off. "Science," they said with withering disgust, as if nothing could be more ridiculous.
posted by philip-random at 7:01 AM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

I prefer the citric acid cycle.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 12:12 PM on November 8, 2021

Previously.
posted by storybored at 6:49 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh man, our brains are terrible. At everything!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:01 AM on November 9, 2021

More silly Rorschach interpretations:

Gnomes high-fiving

Rabbits doing "The Bump"

Sorcerer conjuring fire

Um...hmm. I dunno; is it a vagina? (SFW)
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:49 AM on November 9, 2021