<story><title>My Cognitive Bias – A cognitive bias explained every time you open a new tab</title><url>https://mycognitivebias.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>voidhorse</author><text>First off, it&amp;#x27;s a neat idea and it extrapolates well to other domains. I&amp;#x27;d love to have &amp;quot;random x definition&amp;quot; when I open a new tab--would ensure I at least get some learning done while procrastinating on the web.&lt;p&gt;On a less positive note, and tangentially related:&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m kind of sick of the whole &amp;quot;bias&amp;quot; obsession. It&amp;#x27;s everyone&amp;#x27;s go-to counterargument these days, and it&amp;#x27;s a shallow, poorly developed one. It&amp;#x27;s like everyone&amp;#x27;s lost critical reasoning skills, which require delicate attention to the particular strategies and propositions deployed in a given argument, and found these set of stock biases to use instead. In fact it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;impossible&lt;/i&gt; to purge an argument or line of thinking of &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; so-called biases (though these don&amp;#x27;t actually exist in arguments, they are deduced from arguments)--if it were, it wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an argument or thought.&lt;p&gt;The goal of catching our own mistakes is an admirable one, and I&amp;#x27;m not advocating people stop doing that--I just think it too frequently bleeds into trying to find so-called biases in &lt;i&gt;arguments&lt;/i&gt; (whether written or verbal). In fact, this is more or less a fool&amp;#x27;s errand. What people are &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; trying to point out in arguments are &lt;i&gt;logical fallacies&lt;/i&gt; which are traits of the argument. &lt;i&gt;Biases&lt;/i&gt; contrarily occur at the individual level and are &lt;i&gt;operational&lt;/i&gt; flaws, they only occur &lt;i&gt;during&lt;/i&gt; the thought process, and it&amp;#x27;s only meaningful to talk about them in these terms (that is, as they manifest in the ongoing practices of a person)--they are not properties of a line of thought&amp;#x27;s encoding (the written or spoken argument). Fallacies or viewpoints expressed in an argument may &lt;i&gt;hint&lt;/i&gt; at the biases of the author, but it&amp;#x27;s a non-sequitur to start talking about them (when critiquing an argument), as the only way one could actually confirm this is by observing the author at work in daily life. To say, such an such an author is biased, is useless. It doesn&amp;#x27;t contribute meaningfully to a critique of the argument, and it would need to be verified through observation of the author.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Demonstrating&lt;/i&gt; to someone that they have developed&amp;#x2F;fall prey to particular bias frequently and working to rectify that &lt;i&gt;one-on-one&lt;/i&gt; is a totally different story, or trying to catch biases operating in yourself is a totally different story.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I suppose you could say I&amp;#x27;m biased against biases. A joke that illustrates my point.</text></comment>
<story><title>My Cognitive Bias – A cognitive bias explained every time you open a new tab</title><url>https://mycognitivebias.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>I see a lot of plugins to customize the new tab page, but at least the way I use the browser, I usually never spend more than a second on that page.&lt;p&gt;Do people actually look at what&amp;#x27;s on the new tab page?  I literally hit Ctl-T and then start typing a URL or hit a bookmark in the bookmark bar.  I don&amp;#x27;t even know what&amp;#x27;s on the blank tab.</text></comment>