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New cognitive bias articles on wikipedia (update)

by nerfhammer
9th Mar 2012
1 min read
19

108

108

New cognitive bias articles on wikipedia (update)
18satt
31nerfhammer
10Nisan
12nerfhammer
3tgb
1nerfhammer
8lukeprog
6nerfhammer
2lukeprog
8Alex_Altair
140nerfhammer
17Eliezer Yudkowsky
10nerfhammer
14RomeoStevens
8cousin_it
8Alex_Altair
6lukeprog
1NancyLebovitz
1JohnWittle
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[-]satt14y180

I wanted to write a compendium of biases in book form. I didn't know how to get a book published, though.

Silver lining: in the long run, there's a decent chance more people will read what you wrote on Wikipedia than if you put it in a book.

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[-]nerfhammer14y310

Vastly, vastly more likely.

Everyone once in awhile someone sends me a link to an article on wikipedia saying I would find it interesting... and as a matter of fact, I found it especially interesting: I wrote it!

Or, I added a quote to Daniel Kahneman's page that has since appeared in almost every bio of Kahneman that I've seen since. For example, David Brooks wrote a column on Kahneman a few months ago and used the same exact quote I added, so that's millions of people indirectly.

Boggles the mind, really.

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[-]Nisan14y100

Are you http://neurosail.com/? It looks awesome.

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[-]nerfhammer14y120

yup, that's mine too

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[-]tgb14y30

Unsolicited website advice: it changes backgrounds far too quickly for me to read and look at pictures comfortably. There should be some obvious way to get it to stop moving.

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[-]nerfhammer14y10

Criticism is totally fair. I was getting frustrated with it, so I decided to get something done quickly that I could replace later. So, there are flaws.

It's supposed to stop cycling if you mouseover it.

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[-]lukeprog14y80

Re: publishing.

Self-publishing is easy. As for publishing with a mainstream press, I recommend How to Sell, Then Write Your Nonfiction Book.

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[-]nerfhammer14y60

What if I want to write, then sell it? Something that might be achievable could be like what Skeptic's Dictionary or You Are Not So Smart did, they started out as websites that slowly filled out and were ultimately published as books.

(Why isn't there a Singularity Institute Press?)

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[-]lukeprog14y20

Something that might be achievable could be like what Skeptic's Dictionary or You Are Not So Smart did, they started out as websites that slowly filled out and were ultimately published as books.

True, that does work sometimes.

Why isn't there a Singularity Institute Press?

I haven't researched this, but I doubt it would be a profitable distraction from our core work.

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[-]Alex_Altair14y80

Could you give us some discussion as to how you found these? Did LWers write them?

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[-]nerfhammer14y1400

I wrote all of them

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[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky14y170

Holy shmorkies. Thanks and congratulations!

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[-]nerfhammer14y100

Glad you like it. There are zillions more where that came from

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[-]RomeoStevens14y140

An upvote doesn't seem like nearly enough for this. A very sincere thanks for the hard work.

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[-]cousin_it14y80

Thanks for the great work!

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[-]Alex_Altair14y80

Wow! Thanks for all your work!

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[-]lukeprog13y60

Will you please link your LW profile to Neurosail? I keep forgetting the name of your site and there's no reason not to link to it.

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[-]NancyLebovitz13y10

Simplification bias-- this one might be standard, but if so, I don't know a usual name for it.

It's mentioned in NLP that people tend to drop "frames"-- if something is said, people will react to it as though the speaker is endorsing it as true, even though the speaker might be mentioning it as something someone else said.

The link describes people treating a possibility as a certainty. One flavor of this is called catastrophizing, but I don't think that sort of simplification necessarily leads to anchoring on the worst possible outcome.

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[-]JohnWittle14y10

Slightly offtopic: reading through Naive Realism... How does one combat this bias? Or rather, how does one know when one has eliminated it?

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19Comments
Heuristics & BiasesNeuroscienceWikipedia
Frontpage
  • Conservatism
  • Curse of knowledge
  • Duration neglect
  • Extension neglect
  • Extrinsic incentives bias
  • Illusion of external agency
  • Illusion of validity
  • Insensitivity to sample size
  • Lady Macbeth effect
  • Less-is-better effect
  • Naïve cynicism
  • Naïve realism
  • Reactive devaluation
  • Rhyme-as-reason effect
  • Scope neglect

Also conjunction fallacy has been expanded.

(update) background
I started dozens of the cognitive bias articles that are on wikipedia. That was a long time ago. It seems people like these things, so I started adding them again.
I wanted to write a compendium of biases in book form. I didn't know how to get a book published, though.
Anyway, enjoy.
Mentioned in
29Which cognitive biases should we trust in?