Your father, 50 years on a spinning & wobbling surface, where hurled sunlight takes 8 minutes to cast my naked existential shadow upon the salty sands

Dedicated to: Cole & Sam & Amy & Keely

One day, when I'm not around to recite this to you, remember this is how life came to me:

There was a Child went Forth

THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.
The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him;
Winter-grain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the garden,
And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road;
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had lately risen,
And the school-mistress that pass’d on her way to the school,
And the friendly boys that pass’d—and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls—and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.
His own parents,
He that had father’d him, and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb, and birth’d him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that;
They gave him afterward every day—they became part of him.
The mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table;
The mother with mild words—clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by;
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust;
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture—the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay’d—the sense of what is real—the thought if, after all, it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time—the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets—if they are not flashes and specks, what are they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank'd wharves—the huge crossing at the ferries,
The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset—the river between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three miles off,
The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide—the little boat slack-tow’d astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away solitary by itself—the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass.

With ALL my Love: Papa

When we watch what children see...

WhyI make the time to slow myself...and just pause


Sparkles From the Wheel


WHERE the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on, the live-long day,
Withdrawn, I join a group of children watching—I pause aside with them.

By the curb, toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel, sharpening a great knife;
Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone—by foot and knee,
With measur’d tread, he turns rapidly—As he presses with light but firm hand,
Forth issue, then, in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel.

The scene, and all its belongings—how they seize and affect me!
The sad, sharp-chinn’d old man, with worn clothes, and broad shoulder-band of leather;
Myself, effusing and fluid—a phantom curiously floating—now here absorb’d and arrested;

The group, (an unminded point, set in a vast surrounding;)
The attentive, quiet children—the loud, proud, restive base of the streets;
The low, hoarse purr of the whirling stone—the light-press’d blade,
Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
Sparkles from the wheel.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass

It was this poem that I had the idea, that Whitman was really just a wandering Taoist in coveralls.

Circumstantial Evidence...like when you find a trout in your milk / When some folks don't see the world as you do

Sometimes as I wander amongst the day...I wonder, why does today seem different?

(self recognized items are in BOLD)

Maybe...this is why:


Cognitive bias is distortion in the way humans perceive reality (see also cognitive distortion). See also the list of thinking-related topic lists.

Some of these have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are considered general categories of bias.
Contents

* 1 Decision-making and behavioral biases
* 2 Biases in probability and belief
* 3 Social biases
* 4 Memory errors
* 5 Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases
* 6 References
* 7 See also

Decision-making and behavioral biases

Many of these biases are studied for how they affect belief formation and business decisions and scientific research.

* Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, manias and socionomics. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
* Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
* Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
* Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
* Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
* Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
* Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one's own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
* Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
* Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
* Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
* Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
* Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
* Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
* Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
* Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
* Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
* Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
* Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
* Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
* Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
* Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
* Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
* Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
* Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
* Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
* Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

Biases in probability and belief

Many of these biases are often studied for how they affect business and economic decisions and how they affect experimental research.

* Ambiguity effect - the avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
* Anchoring - the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
* Anthropic bias - the tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
* Attentional bias - neglect of relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
* Availability heuristic - a biased prediction, due to the tendency to focus on the most salient and emotionally-charged outcome.
* Belief bias - the tendency to base assessments on personal beliefs (see also belief perseverance and Experimenter's regress).
* Belief Overkill - the tendency to bring beliefs and values together so that they all point to the same conclusion.
* Clustering illusion - the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.
* Conjunction fallacy - the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.
* Gambler's fallacy - the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events — "the coin has a memory".
* Hindsight bias - sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the inclination to see past events as being predictable.
* Illusory correlation - beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.
* Ludic Fallacy - the analisys of chance related problems with the narrow frame of games. Ignoring the complexity of reality, and the non-gaussian distribution of many things.
* Mind Projection Fallacy - The notion that probabilities represent intrinsic properties of physics rather than a description of one's knowledge of the situation.
* Myside bias - the tendency for people to fail to look for or to ignore evidence against what they already favor.
* Neglect of prior base rates effect - the tendency to fail to incorporate prior known probabilities which are pertinent to the decision at hand.
* Observer-expectancy effect - when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
* Optimism bias - the systematic tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.
* Overconfidence effect - the tendency to overestimate one's own abilities.
* Polarization effect - increase in strength of belief on both sides of an issue after presentation of neutral or mixed evidence, resulting from biased assimilation of the evidence.
* Positive outcome bias - a tendency in prediction to overestimate the probability of good things happening to them (see also wishful thinking, optimism bias and valence effect).
* Recency effect - the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule).
* Rosy retrospection - the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
* Primacy effect - the tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.
* Subadditivity effect - the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.
* Texas sharpshooter fallacy - the fallacy of selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data is collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis fairly.

Social biases

Most of these biases are labeled as attributional biases.

* Actor-observer bias - the tendency for explanations for other individual's behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation. This is coupled with the opposite tendency for the self in that one's explanations for their own behaviors overemphasize my situation and underemphasize the influence of my personality. (see also fundamental attribution error).
* Egocentric bias - occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.
* Forer effect (aka Barnum Effect) - the tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
* False consensus effect - the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
* Fundamental attribution error - the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).
* Halo effect - the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).
* Illusion of asymmetric insight - people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
* Illusion of transparency - people overestimate others' ability to know them, and they also overestimate their ability to know others.
* Ingroup bias - preferential treatment people give to whom they perceive to be members of their own groups.
* Just-world phenomenon - the tendency for people to believe that the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve."
* Lake Wobegon effect - the human tendency to report flattering beliefs about oneself and believe that one is above average (see also worse-than-average effect, and overconfidence effect).
* Notational bias - a form of cultural bias in which a notation induces the appearance of a nonexistent natural law.
* Outgroup homogeneity bias - individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
* Projection bias - the tendency to unconsciously assume that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions.
* Self-serving bias - the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).
* Self-fulfilling prophecy - the tendency to engage in behaviors that elicit results which will (consciously or subconsciously) confirm our beliefs.
* Trait ascription bias - the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.

Memory errors

See Memory bias.

* False memory
* Hindsight bias, also known as the 'I-knew-it-all-along effect'.
* Selective Memory

Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

* Attribution theory, especially:
o Salience
* Cognitive dissonance, and related:
o Impression management
o Self-perception theory
* Heuristics, including:
o Availability heuristic
o Representativeness heuristic
* Adaptive Bias

References

* Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-050477-6
* Gilovich, T. (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-911706-2
* Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28414-7
* Gilovich, T., Griffin D. & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002). Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-79679-2
* Baron, J. (2000). Thinking and deciding (3d. edition). New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65030-5
* Bishop, Michael A & Trout, J.D. (2004). Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516229-3

See also:

* Attribution theory
* Systematic bias
* Groupthink
* Logical fallacy
* Media bias
* Self-deception