i start making bacon popcorn and now just a few days later i find myself in a restaurant WITH IT ON THE MENU. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!
i know it’s just an example of the baader-meinhof phenomenon, but still, i’m pretty sure i’ve never seen it on a menu before.
new unsurprising research ( given the the cognitive basis for irrationality ) formalizes the concept of the “filter bubble” with a mathematical model of biased assimilation which leads to polarization which is a fancy way of proving that, “we look at the world with rose-colored blinders. We see what we want and ignore what doesn’t fit…”
i never tire of reading about the cognitive basis for irrationality with one of my favorite cognitive biases being the overconfidence effect where, generally speaking, even when you’re 100% certain in something you’re probably only actually correct 80% about of the time. to make matters even more uncertain, new facts are piling up at an astonishing rate and half the facts you know are probably wrong!
perusing this exhaustive list of cognitive biases and it really is amazing that humans every have anything approaching a rational thought. for whatever reason, reading about research on confirmation bias has always been a favorite pastime. throw in cognitive dissonance, and motivated reasoning and you’ve got yourself a whole mess of irrationality.