Spending our time in worlds that don’t exist

Paul Bloom has a fascinating article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic that touches on libertarian paternalism, behavioral economics, pigeons, Walt Whitman, and gambling addiction. One of the most interesting sections is where he discusses how much time we spend in existences we know to be not real,
… The most common leisure activity [...]

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Mortality priming modulates children preferences

What reason do we have to fight through struggles when we know that we will one day die? Terror management theory (TMT) posits that when people experience existential angst they will mitigate this angst in a number of predictable ways. Wisman and Goldenberg (2005) examine the evidence for one surprising prediction for TMT: when primed [...]

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Mortality priming modulates children preferences

What reason do we have to fight through struggles when we know that we will one day die? Terror management theory (TMT) posits that when people experience existential angst they will mitigate this angst in a number of predictable ways. Wisman and Goldenberg (2005) examine the evidence for one surprising prediction for TMT: when primed [...]

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More evidence for lack of predictive abilities in humans

The predictive abilities of humans under uncertainty is a hot area of research today. Lots of time is spent determining how we go about making decisions, at least in part so that one day we will know how to improve these abilities.
Brown and Steyvers (2008) formulated an experimental design where subjects were asked to determine [...]

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How the Mind Works book notes

This is perhaps Pinker’s most famous book, and it encompasses a broad range of topics, touching on lots of evolutionary psychology to explain a plethora of cultural phenomena. I enjoyed it, but I thought that the chapters on vision and the last part about music were a tad too long and probably could have been [...]

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Does primacy trump recency?

One of the more nuanced critiques of the literature on human cognitive biases is that some of them posit conflicting effects. Probably the most glaring discrepancy is the difference between the primacy and the recency effect in hypothesis formation. Which factor is more important? Marsh and Ahn take on the challenge in their 2006 paper,
Some [...]

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Nonevidence for temporal asymmetry

Scientists often assume that the human brain is inherently designed for prediction. But there have been precious few behavioral studies giving evidence for this thesis.
Jones and Pashler of UCSD attempt to create a model for this in their recent paper, by looking at whether individuals are more skilled at prediction or retrodiction. In their experiment, [...]

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Individual over group bias

The claim that individuals believe themselves to be better drivers than average is one of the common pieces of evidence used to show the effect of overconfidence bias. The BPS Research Digest reports that the experimental method of these results may be slightly flawed.
Instead of asking students to compare themselves to the overall group (or [...]

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Eliezer on the singularity

It’s weird to see Eliezer and hear his voice since I’ve been reading his stuff for about 9 months now and absorbing it like crazy with no knowledge of Eliezer (or “Ely”) at all. This is probably hindsight bias, but his speech reminds me of his writing style. Here are a few notes of mine [...]

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