There is an extremely interesting article by Itiel E. Dror titled Cognitive and Human Factors in Expert Decision Making: Six Fallacies and the Eight Sources of Bias which appeared in Analytical Chemistry magazine on June 8, 2020 pages 7998 to 8004. You can download a .pdf file of it. I have shown those eight sources of bias (above) via a ladder rather than the pyramid he used. (On May 25, 2018 I blogged about Cognitive biases and the frequency illusion).
I found that Analytical Chemistry article via a search that began by reading an article by Douglass Starr titled The Bias Hunter on pages 686 to 690 in the May 13, 2022 issue of Science magazine. That led me to look at PubMed Central for articles by Dror, where I found a recent article by Adele Quigley-McBride et al in Forensic Science International: Synergy on February 20, 2022 titled A practical tool for information management in forensic decisions: Using Linear Sequential Unmasking-Expanded [LUS-E] in casework.
A recent example of bias was discussed by Madison Dapcevich in an article at Snopes on May 11, 2022 titled Does this NASA photo show a ‘portal’ and ‘wall’ on Mars? That 11” wide by 17” high doorway is an example of pareidolia, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as:
“the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern”
2 comments:
Hi Richard.
Good to see you still active.
How does this graphic help us to move beyond these errors?
Have you read Francis Bacon's Novum Organum?
That's the original work on this issue.
The ‘ladder of abstraction’ shows how those eight sources of bias rank better than a pyramid would. The DIKW pyramid goes in a direction opposite to the one Dror used. I blogged about the pyramid and ladder on December 2, 2019 in a post titled How we know things, and can talk about what we know – climbing from concrete to abstract.
I have not read Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum, and have no good reason to do so now. Dr. Dror has provided us with 78 references, the oldest from 1977. Science is cumulative, so we can mainly look at the twenty-first century articles.
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