Oct 20 2009
∞
“ One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.
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somewhat related: the New Shelton wet/dry is far and away my favorite blog. As in, were they to issue notice tomorrow that it was subscription only, I would unhesitatingly pony up, even if they quoted a fee that was tantamount to museum membership. They recently lost a server — and with it, all their years of postings, and with that, all my accumulated links to their site are now broken. If they manage to restore it all, I doubt I’ll get around to updating all my links, so I hope you’ll bear with me — us — and take a moment to reflect on the tenuous link(s) to the things we hold dear on the internet.
