The decoy effect is one of my favourites. It occurs when your preference for one of two options changes dramatically when a third, similar but less attractive option is added into the mix.
For example, in Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational was a true case used by The Economist magazine. The subscription screen presented three options:
Web subscription - US $59.00. One-year subscription to Economist.com. Includes online access to all articles from The Economist since 1997
Print subscription - US $125.00. One-year subscription to the print edition of The Economist
Print & web subscription - US $125.00. One-year subscription to the print edition of The Economist and online access to all articles from The Economist since 1997.
Given these choices, 16% of the students in the experiment conducted by Ariely chose the first option, 0% chose the middle option, and 84% chose the third option. Even though nobody picked the second option, when he removed that option the result was the inverse: 68% of the students picked the online-only option, and 32% chose the print and web option.
The idea is that you’d spend the money on the option you think is “a steal” even though you had no previous plans of purchasing it.
Oh man “blue light specials” and the like used to drive me nuts. I never understood why people would buy things they had no plans on buying.
It was a zero percent savings to me.
JC Penney decided to show the actual price on clothing instead of what clothing retailers usually do, which is a grossly inflated price and then a slash through it and another sticker that reads like 30% off and bullshit events like “store credit” and discount sales every weekend. It was called “Fair and Square Pricing” and was quite competitive price wise with other retailers.
It nearly bankrupted them because nobody wanted to shop at a place where they weren’t getting a deal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/fair-square-pricing-thatll-never-work-jc-penney-we-being-794530
Favorite Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy
Almost links eventually lead to philosophy!
Chesterton’s Fence is a good one that I’m working on. Never get rid of or dismiss something until you’ve understood how and why it came to be and what purpose it served.
Something like that.
Also, in the other direction, Second Order Thinking, do a triple T chart and describe the shor, medium, and long term knock-on consequences or experiental results it is likely to yield
And complementary to Chesterton’s Fence is a principle I’ve heard called Grandma’s Ham or the Monkey Ladder Experiment. Sometimes “we’ve always done it that way” is covering up outdated practices for purposes that no longer exist.
I don’t have any specific Wikipedia article, but if you want more in depth reading material, Thinking Fast and Slow is probably the authoritative work on bias, by one of the central figures to the emergence of behavioral economics.
Misbehaving is another.
The vast majority of books I read that touch on decision making or bias cite at least one or Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler, and they’re both reasonably accessible. If you want something more accessible than that, Thinking in Bets covers similar ground. Annie Duke targets general audiences well, but all of her books also make her strong foundation in the field of psychology and what the research supports pretty clear.
Edit: You know what? I will pick one special one. Hindsight bias, or as Annie Duke calls it, resulting. A good decision doesn’t become a bad one when the result doesn’t work out the way you want. It is an opportunity to re-evaluate, and see if there were things you could have predicted given the information you reasonably had available at the time, but, you should do the same with decisions that work out. A good decision can result in a bad outcome and a bad decision can result in a good outcome. Make a continuous effort to improve your process, but separate the process from the results. Mortgaging your house to make a bet on the Super Bowl wasn’t genius if your team won.
Anyone playing PvP games should be very familiar with hindsight bias.
I don’t know about favorite, but high on the mess-with-the-head factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion
Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, another close family member, or pet has been replaced by an identical impostor.[a] It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), the French psychiatrist who first described the disorder.
In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a “mirror image” or double dissociation of prosopagnosia, in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system which produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces.[21] This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not “quite right” about them. In 1997, Ellis and his colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic emotional arousal response.[22] The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients with the disease experience a “loss” of familiarity, not a “lack” of it.[23] Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition.[24] This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2001.[2]
galvanic skin responses
There’s another interesting rabbit-hole.
Dunbar’s number especially when used to contextualize the potential limits of human organization, such as relying only hiring friends and family. The chances that of the 200 people who probably know pretty well also happen to be the best candidate for an important task is low. Most exaggerating case of this is presidential nominees for positions. Like of course it’s the same guy for a few admins, it’s who they know that is remotely qualified.
The self as an illusion is an interesting concept to play with. We think of ourselves as identities so that we can operate socially. However when one examines the moment to moment experience of consciousness the self is nowhere to be found.
Only if you look at things a certain way. There’s real danger to believing that you lack actual subjectivity, its like reverse solipsism, and is basically the worst version of doomerism.
If you look at things dialectically and Materialistically, subjectivity can’t be avoided
I’ve heard people advance the argument that since the self cannot be shown to exist, ‘free will’ is also absent and we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions. I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian conception of free will but I still want to be involved in my decisions and choices, even if that is limited to an awareness.
But the self can be shown to exist, unless you deny the existence of subjectivity. this leads to hard determinism, what you referred to as no free will.
The productive, creative process itself, the drive to learn and be curious, to investigate, all of this leads to the conclusion that 1. There is some kind of greater will guiding us or 2. Humans have the ability to make determinations based on their experiences, and choose certain actions based on those experiences.
I’ve seen the deterministic argument that free will is an illusion caused by a chain of circumstances, but I don’t buy it. I think that the view that free will is an illusion is itself a logical error: the result of a dependence of the tendency of dualism to try and turn everything into objects, rather than seeing each object within its relationships, coming together to form a totality. This tendency leads to vulgar empiricism and positivist views. These views always obscure social relationships, which are real, measurable and predictions can be made based on them.
The “I’m so deep I’m a nihilist” trope has got to go. Every TV show or movie where there is some supposedly hyper intelligent character, they always have the most vile, garbage philosophy.
I suppose it’s early days for neuroscience but many functions of the mind have been linked with areas of the brain, except the generation of the self. That self seems to come about as a result of time spent in the world and is shaped by it so why can’t we find it? Even if we do find a particular area of grey matter, it’s not as if we will find a self molecule and be able to measure it, that’s not how neural networks operate. The best we can say is the self is an organism with memory, a vehicle for genetic material that has become so complex that it’s unable to discern what it is made of.
Well I disagree that “we can’t find it”. I think the inability to find the self is a result of the limitations of empiricism, whereas dialectical and materialist analysis has no problem locating the self within the changing relationships that define the individual, history and nature in context of each other.
And this is what empiricism really fails at: its great at defining an object, defining the parameters that constitute it, and isolating it as a subject of study, but absolutely falls short at being able to identify the relationships between “things” or the historic circumstances that give rise to them.
As observers, an over-reliance on one theory of knowledge, or epistemology, verges on the kind of ideological blindness usually associated with fringe fundamentalism. We wouldnt us a ratchet to hammer a nail, why would we insist that a single epistemic “tool” is the only one that is capable of determining truth?
Honestly I probably agreed with you more some years ago before reading Sam Harris’s Free Will, which was so bad it set me on a very different path of inquiry.
I suspect the reason we can’t find the self is the same reason we can’t find the other conceptual objects in our imaginations. They feel real and they are useful but ultimately they are like money, religion, nation states, laws and insurance - purely conceptual and dependent on our shared belief in them.
I’m suspicious of the desire to lean too heavily on concepts such as the self and free will. Much of our societal structures past and present depend on their existence, how else can we accuse others of crime if the perpetrator didn’t have a choice? It wasn’t that long ago that we were prosecuting animals for the crimes listed in our statutes. Currently we don’t believe other animals are capable of this level of agency but nobody has presented any compelling evidence, either way.
Famously, Kant stripped away all his preconceptions and could prove only the subjective (I think therefore I am), whereas you seem to deny everyone their subjectivity, even your own. In any case since you’re interested in these questions, I assume then you’ll reach a better understanding of these questions, just keep studying and growing on your own terms (which is contradictory to your own thesis, but the whole is always defined by contradiction.)
I couldn’t imagine having a “favorite” mind impediment, by their nature they’re not without equal hampering potential. I can just say though which fascinate me.
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Appeal to the masses. I deal with this a lot. Some will say or imply “the masses think something, therefore it must be true”. Most people will treat “headcanon” and “canon” as separate but they’ll treat it the same. Ever had words put into your mouth with them insisting you meant something you didn’t? By their logic, those words are now your own. This is related to so many of the things people falsely think about me, which is “in” to do so they accumulate.
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Judgment by association. Same people usually, again something I’m very familiar with. I’m sure one of the reasons for my social situation is because others are suspect once they associate with me who is often suspect. The words “show me who your friends are and I’ll show you who you are” are even often explicitly the words that serve as the heart of some peoples’ “awareness” campaigns. It is persecution based on your interests.
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“If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy” is one I can quote Anakin, Jesus, and several Democrat politicians on. It is probably wishful thinking (…which reminds me of another fallacious mindset, treat that as a bonus once you read into those), but my inner Christian likes to think Jesus didn’t mean it this way, because it’s irresponsible, for a lack of a better word. I see people all the time forced to make such choices as if it isn’t anti-diplomatic. The fact Anakin memed it at least gives me “favoritism” towards it though.
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The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions
