Dollarmansteve

JFK, 9/11, Moon landing - whatever your pleasure, please read below. They are not my words (reference included) and they are not about conspiracy theory type beliefs, but if you can put your ego aside for the 2 minutes it takes to read below and try to understand how your brain works.. you might just learn something.

Here are 10 reasons why, if you hold conspiracy-style beliefs close to your heart, you are probably insane.. or at least ignorant of your own cognitive shortcomings:

1. Availability bias, which causes us to base decisions on information that is more readily available in our memories, rather than the data we really need;

2. Hindsight bias, which causes us to attach higher probabilities to events after they have happened (ex post) than we did before they happened (ex ante);

3. The problem of induction, which leads us to formulate general rules on the basis of insufficient information;

4. The fallacy of conjunction (or disjunction), which means we tend to overestimate the probability that seven events of 90% probability will all occur, while underestimating the probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur;

5. Confirmation bias, which inclines us to look for confirming evidence of an initial hypothesis, rather than falsifying evidence that would disprove it;

6. Contamination effects, whereby we allow irrelevant but proximate information to influence a decision;

7. The affect heuristic, whereby preconceived value-judgments interfere with our assessments of costs and benefits;

8. Scope neglect, which prevents us from proportionately adjusting what we should be willing to sacrifice to avoid harms of different orders of magnitude;

9. Overconfidence in calibration, which leads us to underestimate the confidence intervals within which our estimates will be robust (e.g. to conflate the 'best case' scenario with the 'most probable'); and

10. Bystander apathy, which inclines us to abdicate individual responsibility when in a crowd.

-Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money [based on Eliezer Yudkowsky, 'Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks', in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic (eds), Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008)]

if you:

a) cant understand the above
or
b) refute the above

Please understand you are a lost cause.

__________________
I died.