Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Confirmation Bias

The discussion of biases, lenses and confirmation bias on Silas' post: Extremist Religion has inspired me. The confirmation bias: most notably displayed in a psychological experiment in which people deliberately check themselves into psych wards and acted normal but found everything they did was interpreted through the lens of illness by the attending physicians and anylysts. 


The problem of finding what one is looking for... 


 In this video Zizek says that the best things we find are the ones we weren't looking for - accidental discoveries; we were looking for one thing and found something else. Perhaps we went to Bible college to find certainty or a job and instead found uncertainty and a few friends... maybe that's better. Anyway, the inescapable personal bias leads me to this song: The Stand by Mother Mother. As usual if you are easily offended you probably shouldn't watch it. 


2 comments:

  1. excellent to bring up our governing biases. just yesterday i was listening to a cbc Radio podcast Ideas- how to think about science, and it was a discussion on the "invention" of post tramatic stress disorder. How it is a reality largely because the symptoms are so nondiscript that everyone and their dog has it. Thus we wanted to find something and end up finding a lot more because people started to have it because everyone else did. They went on to say that it is not unreal as it is very real for the people experiencing it but it is also not entirely true either.
    Thus, we do the same with our religion, philosophy, science, everything is socially constructed, which does not make it less real, just less true is some unatainable philosophical notion of objective reality.

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  2. The current definition of bipolar is similar.

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