Tagged “psychology”

Interesting area, and the discussion on whether it matters where the knowledge is stored.

brains are weird. This quote in particular fascinated me:

That seems exciting. I’ve long wondered if in 50 years terms like “emotion” or “reason” will be obsolete. Some future genius will have come up with an integrative paradigm that more accurately captures who we are and how we think.

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others ("I would never do that.."), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.

Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

I liked Uri Bram's comment on this: "A PDF, but well worth the inconvenience".

Some interesting thoughts on writing and communication, and a brief technical dive into emoji encoding and display.

This was a pretty solid list. Mostly simple & sensible.

Link appears to have sadly already suffered linkrot, need to start backing these things up.

Good writeup of the scary phenomenon of getting people to people batshit insane conspiracy theories. "Don't trust experts. Do your own research. Here's some facebook posts to get you started".

Highlights:

• People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to calculate exponential growth
• People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to use a spreadsheet
• The results suggest insufficient demand for help and tools

Effect of the spread of information from fringe to broad adoption to "everyone knows this"

Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks

The best way to practice is to spend time thinking

Why haven’t we stopped climate change? We’re not wired to empathize with our descendants. Artificial distance that we add to 'other people'