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With NSA overreach, nobody is safe from confirmation bias. When investigators have mountains of data on a particular target, it’s easy to see only the data points that confirm their theories — especially in counterterrorism investigations when the stakes are so high — while ignoring or downplaying the rest. The case of Brandon Mayfield cruelly illustrates this reality.
Read more : http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-terrifying-surveillancecaseofbrandonmayfield.html
The following piece was first published here on Jan 10, 2013, and is the #11 most viewed of the year.
The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn't mean our brains don't have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we're subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions.
Read more: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20131219
In a world where the majority of analysts are bi- if not multi-lingual, the question of how language affects both the analytic process and analytic product is an important one. Emotion, language processing and cognitive biases aside, the intriguing question remains: Would you make the same decision in English as you would in, say, Chinese? Most analysts would likely answer yes to this question, but recent research led by Boaz Keysar out of the University of Chicago suggests otherwise. The study, published in Psychological Science, concludes that “people are not as loss averse in a foreign language as they are in their native tongue".
Read more: http://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.be/2013/11/reduce-bias-in-analysis-by-using-second.html
The game, called Macbeth, gives players a group of suspects and information to help decide who committed the crime. The player guides agents as they collect information, and then decides whether that information was affected by certain types of cognitive bias. The game is already getting interest from several federal agencies. Although Macbeth was designed with the intelligence community in mind, the developer of the game said the same model could be used in other areas.
Source: Business Insider
Date: 23/08/2013
People aren't as rational as we would like to think. From attentional bias — where someone focuses on only one or two of several possible outcomes — to zero-risk bias — where we place too much value on reducing a small risk to zero — the sheer number of cognitive biases that affect us every day is staggering. Understanding these biases is key to suppressing them — and needless to say, it is good to try to be rational in most cases. How else can you have any sort of control over investments, purchases, and all other decisions that you make in your life?
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/cognitive-biases-2013-8?op=1#ixzz2djvsW2DU
