Chapter 2: Mindset Flashcards
Good reasoning has three elements:
1) Curiosity
2) Thoroughness
3) Openness
Suspiciously Unexpected Set (SUS)
- when a cluster of unrelated claims/pieces of evidence align with motive to conveniently
- having a SUS indicates we’re not really curious
Accurate Beliefs
- tendency to treat beliefs as binary
- our beliefs should come in degrees of confidence
Accurate Beliefs Depend on Two Factors
1) how confidently the belief represents things as being a certain way
2) whether things actually are that way
Searching Thoroughly has Three Stages:
1) Search stage
2) Evaluation stage
3) Updating stage
Search stage
where we identify a range of possible views and potential evidence for them
Evaluation stage
where we assess the strength of the evidence we’ve identified
Updating stage
where we revise our degrees of confidence accordingly
Possibility Freeze:
the tendency to consider only a few possibilities in detail and thereby end up overly confident that no alternative view is correct
Optional Stopping
allowing the search for evidence to end when convenient; contorts the evidence (knowingly or not), stop looking when the evidence collected so far supports our first/favored view
Decoupling
Keeping the following separate:
i) our prior confidence in a claim
ii) the strength of potential evidence for that claim
Bias Blindspot
the tendency to ascribe
biases to others but not recognize it
in ourselves
Introspection Illusion
the misguided assumption that our own cognitive biases are transparent/visible to us
Biased Opponent Effect
because we think our own reasoning is unbiased, and that our opponent comes to very different conclusions, we figure that their reasoning must be biased; a result of the introspection illusion
Considering the Opposite
a technique used to reduce biased evaluation; ask ourselves two questions:
i) How would I have treated this evidence if I held the opposite view
ii) How would I have treated this evidence if it had gone the other way. (Consider our reaction if we had observed the opposite evidence, what would we see with evidence-inverting glasses)
