Newsletter
Bias is dead, long live bias and other things
October 18, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: Probably the most consistent theme in my articles is the fact that, although we like to think we’re rational creatures, we are far from it. One of the most obvious places this nervous and ill-fated obsession with rationality plays out for us is in the domain of bias. Since Kahneman and Tversky’s project on ‘cognitive illusions’ in the late 60’s, we haven’t just seen the terminology of bias spread into daily conversation (think ‘confirmation bias’), we’ve also seen this out-of-hand proliferation of all the various ways we’re biased. Over 200, listed on Wikipedia. In theory, you might think this kind of rigour is great. But in practice, what are we supposed to do with all of this? No one’s going around checking their every decision against this endless list. Well, maybe here, we have a way of narrowing things down.
Main idea: Many cognitive biases seem like they can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental beliefs, and then belief-consistent information processing (i.e. confirmation bias).
The real reason male college enrollment is dropping? Author makes a convincing case for ‘male flight’—too many women in a course will make them change course or institution. The corollary is that, with increasing feminisation, college itself becomes less valuable. I’m sure she overstates the case, and the alternative reasons she argues against plays a role. But I’m reminded again of Junger’s thesis that men keep being ‘forced out’ of traditional ways to become men. This article talks a little about how our socialisation of boys contributes to this fearful response. The crisis of masculinity or the young male syndrome seems largely like a failure of us to help them find new ways of being men?
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Advice for those troubled by how difficult it is to go out and not drink. Probably these pressures will ease since no one is drinking anymore.
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Influencer career progression is determined by consistent effort. Not vitality. Rob Henderson talks about this quite revealingly and I’ve noticed a distinct uptick since moving from monthly to weekly writing. People want to see you, perhaps. More than your content?
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Anchoring Digital Sovereignty. Should cyberspace be more like maritime law?
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Nature journal has retracted over 200 papers in a month. One of Springers attempts to capitalise on the Nature brand was as lazy as it seemed
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,