How Cognitive Biases Work

Humans have all sorts of weird quirks that cause us to do silly things and make bad decisions. It’s not our fault though. Our brains are wired that way. Learn about the psychology of cognitive biases in this episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 0:46Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we are getting down to business, getting right to it here on Stuff You Should Know, because we've got a lot to cover here.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 0:59Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, I got a little bit of an intro.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Let's hear it. Was that it? That wasn't it?

• 1:04Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 1:08Josh Clark?

  Do you remember how homeostasis used to come up a lot?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12Josh Clark?

  So for those of you who haven't been listening that long, homeostasis is what your body and your mind and your brain wants to return to, right? You just want everything nice and even keel and normal and, and without exerting too much effort and energy, right? That's homeostasis.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  That's, are you asking me?

• 1:28Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:29Josh Clark?

  Okay. So one of the ways that the, your brain returns to homeostasis as fast as it can is to use shortcuts in making decisions, right? Because if you're having to decide something, you're actively being challenged. You have to, you're not in your homeostatic space. So if you use a shortcut, you can say something like, um, uh, I've had the red apple in the past and it was delicious. I, I've eaten the like brown mushy one before and it was awful. I'm going to eat this red apple, right? Rather than going to the trouble of pulling both apples out and like analyzing them with a microscope and all that, you can just kind of use a little shortcut. That's a heuristic and it makes a lot of sense because your brain is like, great.

• 2:13Josh Clark?

  I didn't use that much energy. I made the right decision and we're good to go. The problem that comes about, though, is that with heuristics, you're not always right. You don't always make the right decision. You're not always taking all of the information into account. And when that happens, you start stumbling into cognitive biases.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, this is a frustrating episode because I feel like the title could be cognitive biases. Everything you think you know is wrong.

• 2:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, well, that's a great title. Let's go with that.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  It just, it made me feel like a dummy the whole time.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  Oh, no, it's, it's, you're not a dummy. All humans are dummies as far as cognitive biases go. It's not just you. And this stuff is hardwired into us because, like I just said, we take mental shortcuts. And the problem, Chuck, is what we're talking about mostly today are unconscious biases.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  There's conscious biases. We just usually call those biases, right? Those are the, the active challenges that you need to overcome to be a better version of yourself. These are like unconscious. So there's not a lot you can do about it. Although at the end, we're going to kind of give you some tips and pointers. But it's a challenge for absolutely everybody. It doesn't, it doesn't make you dumb.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the tips and things can help for sure, but it's just part of being human. You know, the unconscious bias, and there's not a lot we can do to completely eradicate them.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  No.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  And if it's a, you know, if it's a real problem, then I'm sorry.

• 3:49Josh Clark?

  Well, one of the big problems that we all kind of face is that they, we are, um, uh, we're predictably irrational.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59Josh Clark?

  As was said by Dan Ariely, uh, who was a behavioral economist. And because of that, corporations, marketers, um, basically everybody who wants to sell you something knows about these things and they can manipulate those things. They can trick you into making decisions you wouldn't otherwise make.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, and we wouldn't even be here probably talking about this if it hadn't have been for two kind of revolutionary thinkers who ended up being some of the more off-sided researchers in the history of research, uh, as we'll learn, especially when it comes to economics. And they were a couple of psychologists, Israeli psychologists named Amos. And I looked up different ways to pronounce this because we always get guff. And I've heard everything from Hard Tversky to his colleague Daniel Kahneman doing more of one of those Versky.

• 4:53Josh Clark?

  Oh, I just heard him refer to him as Big T.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  The Big T?

• 4:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Because it's TV, but those were the two guys working together. They developed this concept in the 70s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And really like got down to it pretty quickly. As a result of Kahneman, I think, taking some issue with the Big T's research. And I guess they kind of bonded over that or something.

• 5:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was pretty cool because Tversky, basically, he was a mathematical psychologist, which anytime you hear mathematical and it's to do with something other than math, what that means is you've taken something and you've you've set it out in a very standardized way. So you can explore it, you can teach it based on certain facets. And the upshot of mathematical psychology, as far as human behavior goes, these are the people who came up with the Kroc idea that humans behave as rational actors. We're self-interested, we take all the best information available to make the best decision for ourselves. And Daniel Kahneman was like, this is not at all true.

• 6:01Josh Clark?

  And he started challenging Amos Tversky's theories. And Tversky, instead of saying like, no, you shut up. He was like, all right, let's go figure it, let's get to the bottom of this. And because of that, yeah, like they formed this partnership that had a huge impact on the world.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's kind of heartening that they, as academics, you know, got together, there were no ruffled feathers, or at least it didn't end up that way. And they worked together. It's kind of a heartening thing, I think, these days.

• 6:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's got to be at least one.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. They came up with a program called the Heuristics and Biases Program to basically, you know, study how human beings make their decisions, how they go through life making choices when they don't have like all the information at hand, all the most perfect information to make that choice. Or if they don't have like all the time in the world to look at the information that they do have to make that choice. So like, how are people making decisions? How are they making mistakes in their decision making? And they ended up coming up with a couple of different

• 7:06Speaker 02

  systems, one which is super quick and one which is much more deliberate.

• 7:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Daniel Kahneman came out with Thinking Fast and Slow, which was one of those super popular airport books, you know?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Thinking, comma, Fast and Slow.

• 7:20Josh Clark?

  Yes, thank you. Eat, shoots and leaves.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 7:25Josh Clark?

  And in it, he basically lays out this kind of shorthand model. He's, he's very explicit to say like, this is not, this is not how like your brain is actually laid out, but it's a good metaphor for it. And system one is how you think quickly. You think almost unconsciously. You make rapid decisions. And that is kind of how we generally navigate life. System two is much more deliberate. It's where we take into account like different ideas. It's where we really stop and think about something before making a decision. And they're essentially competing. There's something called interference. And system one has a really great tendency to interfere with system two. And there was a psychologist working all the way back in

• 8:07Josh Clark?

  1935, named John Ridley Stroop, who basically discovered the Stroop effect that is a way of demonstrating how system one interferes with the slower, more deliberate system two.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, boy. I bet he patted himself on the back after this one because it's one of those things that's so simple, but he, I bet he winked at everyone like, watch this.

• 8:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  This is gonna break your brain.

• 8:31Josh Clark?

  It's genius.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  It really kind of is. So what they did was they simply wrote down

• 8:38Speaker 02

  the names of colors, but they would write down the name of that color in a different color. And then he would just say, ask to the person to read out loud the color of the word that is written, not the color that it's written in. And it is surprisingly difficult to do that. It's just a little weird, brain breaking thing.

• 8:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah. So he's, he's showing that your system one just wants to hurry up and read it.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:02Josh Clark?

  And it's getting it wrong. And that's, that's interference, right? So that kind of like started to lay the groundwork for this idea that we do have kind of competing ways of seeing the world and, and. Making decisions and what Kahneman was saying is that

• 9:20Josh Clark?

  most of the decisions we're walking around making are actually the system one, super fast shorthand decisions, but we think that we're using our more rational mind because we make post hoc explanations for why we decided that. And that's not to say we're all walking around with these creepy little secrets that we know we're like fooling ourselves. We don't realize we're doing this. That's why these biases are unconscious. Even if you stop and think about what you're doing, you may still not come up with the answer like, oh yeah, I was making up explanations after the fact to explain why I actually used system two when I didn't. It's really hard to do that.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Livy gives a pretty good example of that as far as like hiring somebody. Someone may make an impression in an interview that kind of locks it up from the second they walk in. Maybe they look like their their mom or dad or a relative, or maybe they remind them of themselves, or maybe like, who knows what it could be. Then they end up getting that job and later, if you ask the person who hired them, you might say, oh, well, it was because of this, this, and this, and this. When in fact, that's really just system two kind of confirming like, no, it's because the guy walked in wearing a a New York Giants T-shirt.

• 10:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And we will get into some of the problems with the stuff throughout, but this is a good example, right? If the opposite happened, if like you didn't hire somebody because they weren't quite like you, that's an example of a bias too, even if you don't think that that's why you did it. If you're looking at their CV afterward and you're like, oh, they didn't graduate from college. That's why. But really it was not because you're racist. It's not because you're a woman hater. It was because you're preserving your own level of comfort because other groups that are different than you make you uncomfortable. And that's how groups can become entrenched, right? You just once, once one group kind of dominates an organization, they tend to continue doing that because people hire other people who they're comfortable around rather than

• 11:17Josh Clark?

  pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone and probably improving their organization. And that's why diversity programs exist in the first place because of that human tendency.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or maybe they were just a Jets fan.

• 11:29Josh Clark?

  That's possible. I mean, no Jets fan is gonna hire a Giants fan.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, here's a tip. I don't know a lot about interviewing other than be yourself and try and get someone to like you, but don't go into any interview wearing any sort of branded sports apparel.

• 11:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, especially a jersey.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:47Josh Clark?

  I think that says quite a bit.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you wear that Giants jersey in there. Well, I guess you're rolling the dice. You've either got that job.

• 11:55Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Or there's no way you're gonna get it, so. Maybe it's not a bad idea then. I don't even know what I'm, I might be wrong.

• 12:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess if you dressed it up with a bow tie, maybe you could get away with it. But yes, it is still a gamble regardless.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Well, not all jobs you have to wear a suit and tie, you realize.

• 12:12Josh Clark?

  I know, but I'm saying like you dress for the part you want. If you're wearing a Giants jersey with a bow tie, I think you're, you're making a good impression out of the gate.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  All right, so I guess we can talk about, we're gonna go through a list of about 10 different biases. And they're all pretty interesting, and I know everyone can identify with probably each of these at some point. But before we do that, we need to point out that like, these are all mental shortcuts or the result of the mental shortcut. But not all of them work in the same way and how our brains work. A lot, you know, there could be a lot of things at play. Emotions can come into play. Maybe like we were just talking about, like, it's hard to reassess something after you've gotten a first impression. People, humans, historically through their life, tend to make bad guesses at things. Because if you make great guesses, then things like, you know, gambling would be super easy.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  So all of these things come into play. There's not just like a single way that this, it's a broken system.

• 13:14Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. But people generally, it seems like universally in a lot of these cases behave in these ways under the same circumstances.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, like some of their stuff wasn't replicatable, but that's sort of standard for studies in psychology. Like, a lot of this stuff, as we'll see, has checked out across cultures.

• 13:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is huge, you know, considering the whole weird problem in psychology in particular.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  The weird people are...

• 13:44Josh Clark?

  Western, educated, industrial, rich.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  What's the R?

• 13:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, rich. Democratic, I think.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  All right, so we'll start, we'll leave the biggest guy for last, I think, which will be after a break probably, but we'll start then with maybe hindsight bias.

• 13:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  And this is the idea that after something has occurred, and we've talked about this one before here and there, that we tend to think like, oh, well, of course that was gonna happen. In fact, not only was that, should I have seen that coming? It was probably inevitable that that happened. And a lot of the time, it may be because you're misremembering your expectation before it even happened.

• 14:20Josh Clark?

  Right. Like, we can rearrange our memory of how we felt about the event or the outcome of the event afterward to basically match the outcome.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Josh Clark?

  I guess because we have this never-ending need to be right.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that probably has something to do with it.

• 14:34Josh Clark?

  And I knew you were going to say that.

• 14:38Josh Clark?

  So, I've got another one for you, Chuck.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  All right.

• 14:42Josh Clark?

  Self-serving bias combined with a little fundamental attribution error on the side.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good one. It's a good side dish.

• 14:50Josh Clark?

  So, self-serving, these things basically go hand in hand. It's basically how we see ourselves in a great light, how we see other people in a more negative light. Self-serving bias is basically saying, if something good happens to you, it's because you are good. Like, you earned it. It's because of you doing something right. Something bad happens to you, it's external forces that made that happen.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:14Josh Clark?

  Fundamental attribution error is the exact opposite with other people. If they do something right, it was just luck. If something bad happens to them, it's their own fault. So, a good example of this is like if a coworker comes in late one day, you're like, they're just lazy and slack. But then you come in late the next day and you're like, it was traffic.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:34Josh Clark?

  That's basically those two things going hand in hand, and those are, those are both biases.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I hope people understand that, like, all of those things can also be true. You know?

• 15:45Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  So if you're, if you're thinking like, well, no, but some, you know, sometimes I did deserve the thing and sometimes it was someone's fault. Yeah, sure, that can happen. That's, we're not, these aren't absolutes.

• 15:58Josh Clark?

  No, it's more just, yeah, your, your, your tendency to think in certain ways. Yeah, sometimes you're going to be right. Sometimes you're going to be wrong, for sure.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Like humanities tendency. So yeah, you gotta take a big, broad view here.

• 16:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but also you specifically.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:14Josh Clark?

  You, James Kirkland, listening in Baltimore.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  There's one, oh, man, James Kirkland is going to pull over to the side of the road right now and really freak out.

• 16:23Josh Clark?

  I hope, man, I hope I nailed it.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you picked a common enough name.

• 16:28Josh Clark?

  We'll see.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  All right. So anchoring bias is another one. This one I've fallen prey to, I'm going to say that probably about all these, but that is the first piece of info that you get about something can really affect and even in a very disproportionate way, things that happen after that. Like, once something is kind of locked in, it's hard to unwind that.

• 16:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that first piece of information, it's like, oh, okay, this is, this is going to basically prime you in your answer, your decision, right? So a good example I saw is there was a study that said like, okay, the Mississippi River is less than two miles long. How long is it? And those people would say something like 1,500 miles. And then other people would say, okay, the Mississippi River is less than 500 miles long. And people would say like, it's like 300 miles. And then another group was, the Mississippi River is less than 80 miles long. Those people would answer like 60. The, it's the same thing, the length of the Mississippi River, but they were presented with this, basically this priming number, a large one, a middle number, or a smaller number.

• 17:32Josh Clark?

  And their answers were related to that first piece of information that they got, and that's anchoring bias.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Livia pointed out another little side dish here, which is called the decoy effect. And that's when you will go into a restaurant and they might, and this is how, just kind of one way this can affect economics, which will come up a lot, but you'll go into a restaurant and they might have one super expensive bottle of wine on the menu, and maybe it's even placed at the top so you see it first. And then the other bottles of wine might seem like a decent deal after that, even if they're also overpriced.

• 18:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exploitation.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  But all wine in restaurants is overpriced. I hope everyone realizes that.

• 18:12Josh Clark?

  I mean, by a lot, right? Don't they make most of their margin on that?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. It's frustrating, but it's, that's, that's the business.

• 18:20Josh Clark?

  That's also, I think, Chuck, this anchoring bias is why they say you should never lead in a negotiation with your actual price, that you want to go higher or lower depending on your position.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Oh, like if they ask what you want to get paid?

• 18:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Or like you're trying to buy a car or something like that, you know?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hate all that stuff.

• 18:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, if somebody hits like, well, what do you think I should get paid?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. What are you, what are you looking to make at this job?

• 18:45Josh Clark?

  But that's what I'm saying.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  What you make is, should always be the answer.

• 18:49Josh Clark?

  Exactly. You just want to add, I don't know, 50% to what you actually want and then you're in for negotiation. There's the one other thing that's related to this framing bias, and that's basically the same thing. But rather than the first piece of information guiding you, this is more directly guiding you. So for example, some drug maker says 10% of patients die. You're like, oh God, that's a lot.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:15Josh Clark?

  You could say it the opposite way, 90% of patients live. You're like, oh, that's great. Same amount of people dying, it's just framed differently to exploit your, your response.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  To exploit your aversion to dying.

• 19:30Josh Clark?

  And that's a human thing, isn't it?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  For sure. Shall we take a break?

• 19:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  All right. Josh said human thing, so it's time for a break and we're going to come back with more biases right after this.

• 19:57Josh Clark?

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• 20:07Speaker 02

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• 20:20Josh Clark?

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• 20:36Speaker 02

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• 21:12Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck, up to bat is number 23, availability heuristic.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Can we put like a stadium echo effect on that?

• 21:21Josh Clark?

  Next up at many moto.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Very nice.

• 21:26Josh Clark?

  So what is that availability heuristic? And I'm sure this has happened to you before, right?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. None of these have ever happened to you, which is the funny thing about us doing this episode. But the availability heuristic is what you have available to call up in your brain at any given moment. So you're going to rely more on what you can immediately think of in the moment. And chances are what you're immediately able to think of in the moment is something that probably aligns with your worldview or something like that, which is a sort of a, well, we won't talk about the C bias because that's coming up.

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah, or something that like really kind of goose you emotionally like that's, that's very available because it's like, you know, loud and scary in your mind, kind of, you know, like if you saw something about a plane crash in the last like day or so.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:22Josh Clark?

  And somebody asks you how frequent plane crashes are, you're probably going to give a much higher estimate than you would have before that, you know, maybe based on the number of times you've flown and nothing bad happened.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good one.

• 22:34Josh Clark?

  Um, there's also inattentional blindness. And before anybody, before we talk about this, because we're gonna spoil it.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:42Josh Clark?

  I want to send everybody, if you have the means to do this, go onto YouTube and search for selective attention test. And this is Daniel Simon's YouTube channel. And then watch the test where the people are passing the basketball back and forth. We'll wait a second.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  All right, that's enough.

• 23:04Josh Clark?

  All right, great. So hopefully you pressed pause and you didn't just try to watch it while we were, while Chuck was doing the Jeopardy theme.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  It is short, but it's not that short.

• 23:12Josh Clark?

  It's like a minute and a half or something, right?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:14Josh Clark?

  So tell them, tell them about this video, Chuck, because it's pretty great.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  That's right. In the video, they have a group of, uh, what was it, like six? People, probably.

• 23:25Josh Clark?

  Six on the nose.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Six college students. I guess three are wearing white shirts, three are not wearing white shirts.

• 23:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  And they're in a, in a very tight, small circle.

• 23:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  It looks very awkward. They have a basket, I think, was it two basketballs?

• 23:39Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm. There's two, two groups.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, two groups, two basketballs. And you're, what you're told is the task at hand is to count the number of times that people in white, the white team are passing the basketball. So you're counting, all right, one, two, three, four, four, five, six, seven. And that's all you're supposed to do. And at the end, you're supposed to say, you know, how many times they pass a basketball.

• 24:02Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  And now, now hit them, hit them with the good stuff.

• 24:05Josh Clark?

  So apparently, uh, half of the people who do this, which is astounding to me, half of the people who, who watch this video and take this test don't notice that in the middle of it, a person in a gorilla suit walks into frame and turns to the camera, and I think beats on their chest, and then walks out of frame, like in the middle of these people throwing these basketballs around the gorilla. Half of the people are paying such close attention to counting how many times the, the people wearing white t-shirts are passing the basketball, that they do not notice the gorilla until the end of the video when it's pointed out.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we're assuming it's a person in a gorilla costume.

• 24:46Josh Clark?

  I'm hoping.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  First of all, that might be a bias at play, that it's not a real gorilla.

• 24:50Josh Clark?

  Well, I guess it depends on the amount of funding they had.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks actually like the gorilla from Trading Places.

• 24:56Josh Clark?

  It totally does. Which is like, were they even trying?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:01Josh Clark?

  Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Uh, did you watch this video before you knew about this?

• 25:06Josh Clark?

  I had heard it from some friends who were, who do magic and they were basically talking about this on a little podcast that they made.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You have friends who do magic?

• 25:18Josh Clark?

  Um, so you know our friend Toby?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:21Josh Clark?

  He has very good friends that do magic.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Wow, like professionally?

• 25:25Josh Clark?

  Yes, I became kind of friends with him. So yeah, I guess I do. I have friends that do magic.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Well, buddy, next time we are in Los Angeles at the same time, our good friend and friend of the show, Adam Pranica.

• 25:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Is a member of the Magic Castle. And it's one of his and his wife Elaine's favorite thing to do is to take friends to the Magic Castle. So have you ever been?

• 25:47Josh Clark?

  No.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  And it is great fun.

• 25:49Josh Clark?

  Adam Pranica just keeps getting better and better, doesn't he?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I haven't been with him, but I've been been a couple of times, once many, many years ago, then another probably 10 years ago. But it's a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of magic.

• 26:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  And it's, it's pretty magical when people don't see that gorilla in a very tight frame. It's not like it's on a big basketball court and the gorilla sneaks in there. Like there's six people and then there's a seventh, very clearly.

• 26:13Josh Clark?

  It is, it is very obvious. So I mean, what this is showing is that our attention is limited, right?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 26:19Josh Clark?

  When we're really focused on a task, you, you saw that gorilla, those half of the people who didn't notice the gorilla, you still saw it. But you were so focused on the task that your brain was just getting rid of information that was unrelated to the task. Because it's, it's not pertinent. It can become pertinent, though, when that gorilla decides to attack you. And so this is a cognitive bias we have where we're ignoring potentially unimportant information to take in the stuff that's related to the task at hand.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know where they could really get away with this because where you have great concentration is at a professional sports game on the Jumbotron when they have the baseball under the helmet or whatever. And then they're moving them around and you got to find, you know, it's like three card Monte.

• 27:04Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Because you're concentrating so hard on that, they could, they could put whatever they wanted on that screen while that's going on and, and I bet you most people would not. Or maybe I guess it's half is if that's what they found.

• 27:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'll bet you're right. I'll bet you're right, man.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I was just trying to think of something where you're super trying to follow because I was, I was happy I came up with the correct amount of passes at the end.

• 27:24Josh Clark?

  You did. You said, what does it mean if I noticed the gorilla and got the correct number of passes? And I said, it means you're a perfect human.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  That's right, which we all know is not true.

• 27:34Josh Clark?

  None of us are Chuck, none of us are.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 27:37Josh Clark?

  So there's another one that you may have heard of before, even if you've not heard of any of these other ones called the Dunning Kruger effect. It became kind of viral because if you take it through the pop culture meat grinder, it becomes much more simplified and kind of loses some of its actuality, but

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:54Josh Clark?

  people still like it because it's a good way to put other people down.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. This is the idea that the correct idea is that people with little understanding in an area tend to overestimate their ability and their knowledge about something.

• 28:09Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Because they don't, they know so little, they don't even know what they don't know kind of.

• 28:13Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  But what you were talking about, it's kind of been transformed into like morons have the, are the most like braggadocious, which can be true.

• 28:24Josh Clark?

  It can be, you know, I think that's one of the things, like you said, you can be right with cognitive biases. You're not wrong with them all the time. So yeah, that kind of supports that, but that's not what the Dunning Kruger effect actually says. You said it. And then there's the opposite way too, where the more experience you have, the more expert you are in a field, the more you assume that it should be easier for you than it is.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a very valuable thing to understand, I think. And you get much further in life if. People are like, well, you're the expert. And the expert's usually the one going, yeah, but I don't know. Maybe we should hold off because, you know, X, Y, and Z.

• 29:04Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. So that's the actual Dunning Kruger effect. And I saw that it's, it's being assailed right now. People are starting to question even the basic version of it, like the actual academic version of it. Yeah. So we'll see what happens with that.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. We've got the gambler's fallacy next. And that is, oh, boy, if you have ever gambled anywhere, but if you like, go to casinos and stuff like that, you're going to see this all over the place. You're going to hear it spoken out loud. And this is the idea that you find patterns where there are no patterns.

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  So if you're at the blackjack table and you hear the, the person next to you like, well, oh, man, see, I've lost four in a row. So I'm going to bet like, I'm going to go all in on this because I'm, I'm bound to win because I've lost four in a row. There's no way I'm going to lose five in a row.

• 29:54Josh Clark?

  Right. The problem is, is those, each of those hands of blackjack are unrelated to one another. They don't form a pattern, but you are predicting a pattern that just doesn't exist.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:05Josh Clark?

  That means you're a fallacious gambler.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  That can get you in real trouble. I mean, you could, it's, you can do the same thing on the playground with coin tosses. In fact, coin tosses, I think is a lot of, a lot of times the way they sort of try and prove this.

• 30:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Because each coin toss, considering like you're playing with a perfect unflogged coin that has no bias whatsoever, each coin toss is totally unrelated to the last. So you could get 100 heads in a row and that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean a tail is coming because that, each of those 100 heads in each of those coin tosses had nothing to do with the last one or the next one.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  I know. That's, that's hard to break out of though, because it seems very human to think like they flipped four heads in a row. There's no way there's going to be a fifth.

• 30:49Josh Clark?

  Well, that's another reason why this is so hard. We're hardwired to find patterns and stuff. It's a way to navigate the world. It's the way we navigate the world is by finding patterns so that we can recognize things in the future and thus spend less energy getting back to homeostasis.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  That's right. This is all so interesting to me.

• 31:06Josh Clark?

  I love this stuff.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  I knew that you loved it. This is Josh Clark Central.

• 31:11Josh Clark?

  I love observing it because I can't grasp what it feels like to suffer any of these. So just to discuss it in this way is really fascinating to me.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  All right, let's talk about the base rate fallacy. That means you put more weight on just like one very specific piece of information instead of looking at all the pieces of information that have come your way.

• 31:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and usually it's individuated information, meaning like, say, some quality or characteristic of one person, and then you're ignoring the base rate, which is like pure statistical information about what you're trying to figure out. And a really good example of this is like, let's say that you're looking at somebody who is super fit, a woman who's very fit and athletic, and you're asked, do you think that woman is a personal trainer or a teacher? Because the, basically, the only evidence you have there is that this woman is very athletic and fit, you might say, "personal trainer." But if you took all the base rate information into account, you would know that even the

• 32:12Josh Clark?

  very, say, very small portion of teachers who are very fit and athletic, maybe small compared to the total number of teachers, it's still much larger than the total number of personal trainers in the world. So statistically speaking, it's much likelier that that very fit, athletic woman is a teacher and not a personal trainer. You don't do that because you think, "personal trainer, athletic, fit, must be a personal trainer." You've just fallen prey to the base rate fallacy, my friend.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she has on yoga pants and hokas.

• 32:47Josh Clark?

  Exactly.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  That doesn't narrow down anything these days, you know?

• 32:52Josh Clark?

  How about the mere exposure effect, Chuck? And like, "mere" is part of it, I'm not making a judgment about it.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  That's right. That means just merely being exposed to something has a vast impact. So the more we experience something, the more you like it, which is why you see that commercial for the thing over and over and over, that Burger King ad, over and over and over. Although I wouldn't say that you might like that one the more you heard it.

• 33:22Josh Clark?

  That's the outlier for me, too.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  But that's the idea, though. There's just mere exposure will get you there.

• 33:29Josh Clark?

  And then there's a related thing called illusory truth effect, which is basically that repeated exposure to a lie causes you to eventually believe in it if you hear it enough times, even if you initially knew that it wasn't true. So that makes me wonder if like it just wears you down over time. Like your brain is tired of defending itself against being assailed with a lie. And it's just like, fine, that's true. I don't, I don't care.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, sure. Politics certainly comes to mind. Repeat the lie, repeat the lie, repeat the lie.

• 34:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I mean, like, it's a viable way to exploit people's cognitive biases in that, in that respect.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Should we end up, should we close out with, with the big daddy of them all? The big C, the big confirmation bias?

• 34:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah, let's do it, baby.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  All right. Why don't you, why don't you start this one?

• 34:19Josh Clark?

  Okay, so there's a guy named Peter Wasson back in the 60s. He coined the term confirmation bias. And he basically had an experiment that's really clever. It's hard to understand at first, but it's very clever. He basically said, hey, here is a sequence of numbers, two, four and six. Figure out what the pattern is. Just to be clear, this is really hard to explain. If, if you find somebody who can explain this well, you'll get it. But I don't think I'm a candidate for that. I think we all know that I'm not going to explain this very well.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't, I don't think that's true.

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  Do you want to take a crack?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Okay, the original numbers were two, four, six. And people might tend to go with like, all right, eight, 10, 12. And they thinking it might be, all right, it's even number, uh, sequence, ascending even number.

• 35:09Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  And they would say, no, that's not correct. And you said, well, maybe it's four, eight, 12, and it's like doubled or something. And they would say, uh, well, that's also incorrect. And then you're, you're at wits end because what you haven't done is just done any ascending order. You didn't go 179, 300.

• 35:28Josh Clark?

  All right, let me take a crack at it. You ready?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 35:32Josh Clark?

  So the original number is 246 and the participants would try to come up with the explanation of why, like what are the, what pattern are those numbers following, right? So you might say, uh, the, like, does, uh, eight, 10, 12 work? And they would say, yes. And you'd say, okay, well, then you're just looking at even numbers. And they would say, no, you still got this right. This still fits the pattern, but your, your hypothesis for it is wrong.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Right. That's, yeah, that's the key.

• 36:02Josh Clark?

  Right. Here's where the confirmation bias came in. People would then go back and continue trying to find versions that fit their hypothesis to explain this, even though it was wrong.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:14Josh Clark?

  Rather than take their hypothesis and say, okay, this is right. This fits the pattern, but it's still not correct. And start trying to break their original hypothesis by coming up with like, just completely random stuff that doesn't fit their original hypothesis. In which case they might've said something like, um, does one, six or 27 work? And they would say, no, that's not, that doesn't fit. And then that might lead the person to see that actually the only, the only thing that has to be correct to be part of the model is that the numbers have to ascend in order. That was it. But people, people, man, just go.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  You might even try, you might even try and break it by saying 357, but you're still using that original, uh, a version of that original hypothesis.

• 37:02Josh Clark?

  Exactly. That, that there's, yes, say like that you think it goes up by two or something like that. Yes. You're like, very few people go back and, um, try to break their own hypothesis. And that's the point of confirmation bias. Let's move on from that experiment. The point of confirmation bias that this shows, if you actually can understand it from other people than us, um, is that we tend to take our initial ideas, our beliefs in a lot of cases, and look for information that supports those and discard information that doesn't support it.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Right. And that's of course, you know, I mentioned politics a minute ago. That's where you most firmly see that these days is, uh, you are in a media bubble probably. Uh, I don't know, a ton of people that get their news sources from completely disparate points of view. Uh, and news these days that you're getting is so, uh, A lot of it is so slanted to begin with, it's probably not even the best example anymore to use. But you're probably, a long way of saying, you're probably gonna be seeking out news that confirms your beliefs. Cause you don't want your beliefs challenged.

• 38:07Josh Clark?

  Yes. I, I mean, I, like everybody else, I have trouble with that as well, but I have to boast. Yumi is actually really good about getting news from different sources.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:16Josh Clark?

  And one reason that I find it difficult to do is because I have like physical reactions sometimes.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:23Josh Clark?

  And that is a thing. That's one of the reasons why they think we have, we use confirmation biases. Cause it sucks to be, to have your beliefs challenged, right? It's really difficult to overcome that. And there's this thing called belief perseverance, which is even when your beliefs are challenged with say, like an indisputable fact, you can still use confirmation bias to preserve that belief. Cause we usually attach our identity or build our identity around our beliefs. It's who we are. So it's like we're being personally attacked. And then even more than that, there's the backfire effect, right? Did you see that?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 39:00Josh Clark?

  So the backfire effect says that in the, in the face of being presented with information that is, that, that basically counters your own beliefs, it can make you actually solidify your original incorrect belief in the first place, right? You'll, you'll, you'll believe it even more strongly, even though you've just been given facts that contradict it. So we really, really hang on to our beliefs as much as possible. And that is a huge, huge thing that humans trip over. That confirmation bias is probably the granddaddy of all biases, I think.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why I saved it for last.

• 39:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Uh, and you know, a lot of reasons people do this, you might be protecting your, your, yourself, like your self-esteem. Because otherwise you can, you're admitting that you're, may have been wrong about something. Uh, and it, you know, takes a big person to do that. Uh, you wanna believe that you're right about stuff. And, uh, it also might just be difficult to, to process more than one hypothesis at once. It like might just be a little too brain breaking.

• 40:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because once you lock into an explanation, your brain just, it's like, I, no, we've got it. We don't have to figure this other thing out. Homeostasis, homeostasis, you know? It's, it is very hard to entertain something that is. Counter to what we already think is true.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  That's right. All right, everyone. As you can tell by the clock, we are taking our second break. This is a long one, and we're going to come back and talk about behavioral economics right after this.

• 40:29Josh Clark?

  Well, wait, before we do that, let's try to explain this confirmation bias study again.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should. All right, we'll be right back.

• 40:54Josh Clark?

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• 41:17Josh Clark?

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• 41:33Speaker 02

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• 42:09Speaker 02

  Okay, I promised to talk about behavioral economics. A lot of the work that Tversky and Kahneman did was super applicable and kind of revolutionary in a lot of ways for the world of economics and how people. Buying behavior is affected. They didn't invent it, like Adam Smith wrote about stuff like this. And starting about World War II is when they started really kind of homing in on stuff like this, like using mathematical models. And it all kind of started with the assumption that people and companies and organizations are really just trying to pursue their self-interest at the end of the day.

• 42:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and they're going to make the most rational decision.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:51Josh Clark?

  And that's just, and they were like, yes, we know people make irrational decisions, but these are outliers. Like if you take all of the information and data in aggregate, you'll see that humans generally try to make the most rational decision. That's just not true. People don't do that. We make all sorts of irrational decisions that very frequently run counter to our own best interests. And again, we'll even reject stuff like information that would help us make decisions to our own best interests if they counter our beliefs. So there's a guy named Richard Thaler, who ended up becoming a colleague of Tversky and Kahneman. And he took some of their papers and he realized that these mistakes, these cognitive biases,

• 43:36Josh Clark?

  they can be predictable, right? You can actually basically map how somebody's going to make a bad decision. And this became the basis of behavioral economics.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, well, let's talk about this, this prospect theory, because this was from Tversky and Kahneman. It was an article from 1979 from this idea, prospect theory, colon, and analysis of decision under risk. And Livia says it's probably the most cited economics paper of all time. Like, this was a revolutionary landmark paper. And they didn't write a ton of papers for researchers. They did like eight total.

• 44:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Which just shows what an outsized impact they had. But they talk about in this paper, a lot of attitudes about risk. One is loss aversion, which is the idea that you're going to experience more emotional suffering when you lose money than you will gain happiness if you gain something. So you may pass up an offer that gives you equal odds of winning 25 or losing 20. There was another example, I think, kind of gets it across more, is there was an experiment in 1996 where they gave participants a lottery ticket. And before you scratched it off or whatever, let's say it was a scratch off, they said, all right, well, hold on, before you do that, I'll give you another lottery ticket, plus

• 44:59Speaker 02

  $10 in cash. And for no logical reason at all, people tended to think that that first ticket was the one, even though there was no, it was a lottery ticket, there was no difference at all. They would turn down that extra 10 bucks. I think less than 50% of them took that deal.

• 45:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because in giving away or trading that first ticket, they, they risked a loss, even though the gain was right there. Just trading the ticket, you got an extra 10 bucks, right? That's, that's fairly irrational. We also have a lot of trouble with rare events.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:34Josh Clark?

  We tend to overestimate them. It can be a positive event, it can be a negative event, but we're really bad at probabilities and statistics. And this is essentially, it's like, you, you won't let your kid walk to school because you're afraid of your kid being kidnapped, even though the chance of your kid being kidnapped is just ridiculously low. It's technically irrational, even though very few people would fault you for that. But it's still an irrational decision.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. We talked about that in the. Well, was it?

• 46:12Josh Clark?

  Free range kids?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Maybe. I can't remember. It tied in with the satanic panic and stuff like that, I think.

• 46:17Josh Clark?

  Definitely did.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Back in the day.

• 46:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Relative rather than absolute terms, that is a theory, a monetary theory where, and this is a great example. You might drive an extra 10 minutes in a car to buy a shirt that you know is selling the shirt for 20 bucks rather than the one closer to you that sells it for 30. But you're not going to do that because that saves you 10 bucks. You won't save $20 on a car even though you may even have to drive five minutes down the road. Cause you're like, oh, it's $20. The car's $20,000. But it's really a relative, you know, absolute thing is you're saving twice as much money as you did on that T-shirt purchase.

• 46:56Josh Clark?

  Right. But it's, like you said, it's all relative.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:59Josh Clark?

  Again, totally irrational. But all this stuff relates to economics. And like you said, this stuff can be replicated. There was a 2020 study that looked at the prospect theory in particular. And, and this major study was conducted in 19 countries and 13 different languages and it held up.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Not bad.

• 47:20Josh Clark?

  No, it's not bad at all. And so it's not just economics. It's not just being exploited by the wine list or, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken or something like that to make you buy their stuff. This actually, this can have like life and death consequences too. Although I guess so can wine and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  You know what you're gonna get at Kentucky Fried Chicken?

• 47:47Josh Clark?

  What?

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Pepsi.

• 47:49Josh Clark?

  That's right. You will get some Pepsi.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  You know how I know that?

• 47:52Josh Clark?

  Cause you just had Kentucky Fried Chicken?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  I did. After our tour, I was a little tired and needed just some fried chicken. So I got fried chicken.

• 47:59Josh Clark?

  What do you get? Just the original or extra crispy? Cause you're crazy if you don't get extra crispy.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  I get extra crispy, but they were out, they could satisfy, I got the three piece. They had two more pieces of extra crispy and they asked if one piece of OR was available. And I was like, yeah, sure. I'm not going to not eat a piece of chicken.

• 48:20Josh Clark?

  It is good. They do chicken right.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do.

• 48:24Josh Clark?

  Did you get the mashed potatoes and gravy?

• 48:26Speaker 02

  You know it, buddy, times two and extra biscuit. I went all in. It was a rare

• 48:31Josh Clark?

  treat.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Eating frenzy.

• 48:33Josh Clark?

  Did you drink a Pepsi?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  I did.

• 48:35Josh Clark?

  Awesome. Well, that all fits somehow. I don't know how, but it somehow fits this episode. So where I was saying that this is can be life and death is with medicine. Because although doctors have God complexes and like to present themselves as infallible, they are quite fallible. They're humans and they can suffer the same cognitive biases as us, but they have your life in their hands. We rarely have others' lives in our hands.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you watch the show The Pit?

• 49:04Josh Clark?

  I tried and it just did not grab me. I gave it like 10 minutes, but I hear nothing but good things.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I really like it. I've never been a hospital show guy. So this is kind of my, one of my first forays into it, but I like it a lot. I haven't started season two, but I noticed when reading through these binds, like medical biases, that they do a, or at least Noah Wiley does a really good job on the show with these younger residents trying to bust through and a lot of this stuff comes up. He doesn't say, hey, that's affect heuristic. He just will talk about what that is. And now that I know the definitions, I'm like, oh, what he's talking about is an outcome bias or an anchoring bias. It's fairly interesting.

• 49:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Rather than say like being presented with a really high price for a bottle of wine to make the other overpriced wine seem like a bargain. This can be like your first lab work comes back and that forms the anchoring biased impression of your condition. And even as new lab work comes back, that doctor may fail to adjust their view of your condition because they're not taking into account this new stuff. They're giving more weight to that original, that original number. So yeah, and that's just the anchoring bias, the way that it can affect. There's, like you said, there's all sorts of other ways for it to happen and all of it can result in poorer

• 50:25Josh Clark?

  outcomes for patients just because their doctors are humans and we don't really approach cognitive biases in a really methodical or deliberate way.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, in fact, now that I'm thinking about it, they do this so much on the show, the show could be called Medical Confirmation Bias.

• 50:43Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  The show, because you see it all the time. Outcome bias is when a shift in the patient's health, you're convinced is the result of a treatment. Like, it's because of that thing I did, or affect heuristic that I mentioned, an emotional reaction to a patient, you know, kind of overrunning, you know, deliberating on this thing in a logical way. This happens all the time on the show.

• 51:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, well, another field that it happens with is forensic science, which we've gone to great lengths to kind of point out is junk in the most, in most cases. And a lot of that junk is just based on cognitive biases.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, certainly, the way they do lineups is flawed. I mean, the way they, I feel like you're right, we've done this a lot on the, on the show. The way they have done a lot of this is super flawed. And I think maybe they're looking at it some, but not a lot.

• 51:35Josh Clark?

  No. So if you want to fight cognitive bias in your own mind, Chuck, what do you do? What do you do?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Well, there's a list of good tips here, and I think these are pretty good tips. The first one is just being aware that you have these, which is something that we've already kind of, kind of worked through on this episode, except for you, of course, because you don't have these.

• 51:56Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  But studies show that like, just being aware, it's not one of those things where like, well, being aware is half the problem. It's like, being aware seems like 2% of the problem.

• 52:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's like, you're aware that you have an unconscious bias. It doesn't make you understand the bias. You just know that they're there, right? That's the problem with is unconscious.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  What else?

• 52:20Josh Clark?

  There are some like, actual things you can do, like delay decision making. Like, don't, don't come to snap judgments. Go get more information. Go get information from a contradictory source, or different source, or something like that. And then it like, kind of tied into that, you can have like, personal, like, rules. Like, if there's a big decision, you will not make that decision until you've slept on it.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:46Josh Clark?

  For example, don't buy a TV unless your friend says, yeah, good idea.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Try and consider your past experience, for sure, because optimism bias could come into play. Like, hey, worked out last time.

• 53:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Like, why would I, why would I take more time this time?

• 53:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that's another way that you can kind of do that. An exercise you can do is write down your expectations for an outcome. And then go back and look at it afterward and see if you were right or not.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 53:16Josh Clark?

  That can kind of help you realize like, uh, I do kind of tend toward the optimism bias.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz I believe that was one of the other biases is even like, it's hard to recognize because you're biased in that you misremember what you thought going into it. So writing it down is a good, that's a good one.

• 53:31Josh Clark?

  Right, but if you're super, super unconsciously biased, you might be like, someone else wrote this in my handwriting. I've never been this wrong.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Uh, what about Thomas Biases and Bayesian reasoning?

• 53:44Josh Clark?

  So he was a minister from the 18th century and he basically came up with a standardized formula for taking into account the probability of an outcome, right? That things aren't essentially, so I saw this on lesswrong.org founded by one of the guys who wrote, um, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies about AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky. The whole point of lesswrong.org is to overcome your biases in a methodical way. And they love Bayesian reasoning and it basically says, there's no such thing as something is just true. Everything is just a probability. And you can kind of try to determine how probable something is based on whatever evidence you can gather about it, just basically going through life like that.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  You know who hates that website?

• 54:30Josh Clark?

  Who?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  L E S R O N G, that dude who started his own personal comedy website, lesswrong.com.

• 54:39Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  He's just getting smashed.

• 54:43Josh Clark?

  What else, Chuck?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Um, what else is, I cultivated growth mindset.

• 54:49Josh Clark?

  That's a big one.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Hey, I make mistakes, I screw things up. And like, I need to recognize that and try and grow from that rather than, you know, just being, uh... Confirmed with my own biases constantly.

• 55:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, maybe like looking around at some of the ways that you're commonly exploited. Say like by advertisers, like scarcity is one. When somebody says act now, supplies are limited. They're creating a scarcity mindset in you.

• 55:16Josh Clark?

  Social proof, basically like these people like this, so you probably should too. And you're like, oh, I should like that, too.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:23Josh Clark?

  And then two other things I saw, there's something called cognitive bias. Mod. Modification, I think is what it is.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:34Josh Clark?

  You can use this for like treating anxiety, right? Like people like tend to seek out negative facial expressions.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:43Josh Clark?

  And this treatment is like, like here's a thousand frowny faces. Find the smiley face in there and just screen after screen. You're looking for the smiley face and you're training your brain to stop putting as much weight on negative facial expressions. Just using like basically exploiting your cognitive bias to get over your cognitive bias.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 56:07Josh Clark?

  And then the last thing Chuck is apparently AI are starting to show signs of emergent cognitive biases because they use heuristics too. So they're starting to make cognitive, they're starting to make errors in judgment in predictable ways, which are cognitive biases, just like humans.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Rob Zombie, more human than human.

• 56:29Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 56:31Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 56:33Josh Clark?

  This is a good one. This is fun, Chuck. I'm.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like these.

• 56:36Josh Clark?

  Well, since Chuck and I both liked this episode, that means we have no choice but for listener mail to be triggered right now.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  I'm going to call this follow up on Sebastopol.

• 56:48Josh Clark?

  Oh, nice.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Because I wondered what the connection there was.

• 56:50Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Hey guys, because if you didn't listen, Sebastopol, California, and we were talking about the Sebastopol in the Crimean War. And I was like, there's no way that's a coincidence, and it's not. Hey guys, listening to the podcast on the Light Brigade from Sonoma County. Our Sebastopol was named after Sebastopol. And here's a little information. The settlement was apparently originally named Pine Grove. And the name changed to Sebastopol was attributed to a bar fight in the 1850s, which allegedly compared by a bystander to the long siege of the seaport of Sebastopol during the Crimean War.

• 57:31Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  So the original name survives in the name of the Pine Grove General Store downtown only. And that is it. There's also the Russian River there, Russian River Valley. So apparently there is some Russian influence in that area, which I didn't know about. And that is from Marcia Ford.

• 57:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, also, we want to apologize to all of our Iron Maiden fans who wrote in to be like, dude, that song, "The Trooper," is about that whole battle.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know. I am not, I like Iron Maiden, but I didn't have as much shame upon my head as you. But you didn't, reading the lyrics, it doesn't say, you know, Crimean War, in charge of the Light Brigade, does it?

• 58:12Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I haven't heard it in a while. I'm a big fan of the poster. I love the poster a lot.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, me too.

• 58:20Josh Clark?

  Well, sorry, all of you Iron Maiden fans out there. We'll try to do better next time.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, missed opportunity.

• 58:25Josh Clark?

  Who was that that wrote in about Sebastopol?

• 58:28Speaker 02

  That was Marcia, I believe.

• 58:29Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, we really appreciate you. And if you want to be like Marcia, you can email us as well. Send it off to [email protected].

• 58:44Speaker 00

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• 58:59Josh Clark?

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• 59:30Speaker 00

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