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Showing posts with the label cognitive biases

Are you an adult or adult who is still a child or perhaps something in between or a child who has been adult for a while?

Note: This article is largely based on excerpt from Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson. The catharsis builds on the philosophical notion of nature of Values. READ more: For application and framework to finding out your personalised Values. Past a certain point, maturity has nothing to do with age. There are plenty of grown-ass children in the world. And there are a lot of aging adolescents. Hell, there are even some young adults out there. What matters are a person’s intentions.  The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but WHY they do something Wait I have a more basic question: How are values made, why do religions and cults share them, is it a spiritual thing or like a school thing?  Answer:  The process of forming values is complex and influenced by various factors. Life experiences play a significant role in shaping our values. Emotions, such as pleasure and pain, are generated through these experiences and...

A bulb's survival guide; in a world full of candles!

I was discussing the ironies of human condition and related perils with my inner circle (conveniently). One of friends quoted a saying in Urdu, which loosely translates into "Wisdom is in limited supply and sacred generally, however, wise people are generally unsafe and probably endangered in an ‘ignorant’ surrounding" . We deliberated this for a while and concluded that – One of many subtle incivilities of our times is that: the rare bulb’s get hanged by the crowd of candles . N.B., We are going to push this BULB and CANDLE metaphor to the next level – so strap in your cord tightly! CANDLES are afraid of the light of the BULB – they do not know ‘WHY’ it shines so bright or powered differently or does not have to be sparked by a matchstick and has different thinking/beliefs to us. He is not enticed by the same thing, he is not afraid to shine alone and even if we ostracise him, he keeps shinning. Candles can easily join heads and continue the same bandwagon/following the floc...

Our go to bias - Confirmation Bias

What it is: The confirmation bias is when you look for and only use “facts” that support your pre-existing beliefs while, at the same time, ignoring any information to the contrary. This is often thought of as “cherrypicking,” although cherrypicking facts to support one’s views is usually done consciously. Confirmation bias happens unconsciously. The strange—but fascinating—thing about the confirmation bias is that it seems to run rampant when information is more available to people. That might seem counterintuitive on the surface. After all, more information should lead to better, truer beliefs, right? Well, no. The existence of the confirmation bias actually predicts the opposite: more information creates more opportunities to cherrypick the “facts” we use to support our beliefs. So, exposure to more information actually polarizes beliefs. This explains, in a nutshell, why the internet is a festering shit-heap for political discourse. Instead of changing our beliefs to adapt to new ...