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billswift comments on [Link] You Should Downvote Contrarian Anecdotes - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Vladimir_Golovin 18 June 2012 07:57AM

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Comment author: billswift 18 June 2012 11:34:04AM 4 points [-]

Actually, our minds and memories are particularly receptive to any narrative. Which can also result in problems, both the narrative fallacy ("Our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts" which leads us to overvalue "facts" embedded in a story format) and undervaluing of statistical and other numerical data. I think that particularly overvaluing contrarian anecdotes is context dependent, since we also overvalue anecdotes we agree with (confirmation bias).