cognitive biases
TagDunning-Kruger Discussion
A post by Blair Fix at Economics from the Top Down about whether the Dunning-Kruger effect (the inverse relationship between one’s skills in a particular domain and one’s tendency to overestimate them) is a mere statistical artifact, that I put in the Heap of Links last week, generated some discussion and prompted an email from a philosopher with a possibly helpful ..
A New Kind of Critical Thinking Text (guest post by David Manley)
“What would it look like if we taught only the most useful skills from the toolkits of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics?” (more…)
Philosophy and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actuall..
Cognitive Bias Codex (updated)
Philosophers have long been interested in how we make sense of the world and how thinking goes wrong. Since some of the most interesting work on these topics in recent decades has been done in social psychology on cognitive biases (even acknowledging this), philosophers should at least be acquainted with some of that research—as some already are. (more…)
Philosophers: Disappointingly Normal
Philosophers are sometimes thought of as expert thinkers, more rational and less prone to errors in reasoning than others. Whether this is true, though, is an empirical question, and it is one that several researchers have taken up over the past decade or so. Their findings regularly show that philosophers, like the ordinary folk, are susceptible to various cognitiv..