The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions
The self as an illusion is an interesting concept to play with. We think of ourselves as identities so that we can operate socially. However when one examines the moment to moment experience of consciousness the self is nowhere to be found.
Only if you look at things a certain way. There’s real danger to believing that you lack actual subjectivity, its like reverse solipsism, and is basically the worst version of doomerism.
If you look at things dialectically and Materialistically, subjectivity can’t be avoided
I’ve heard people advance the argument that since the self cannot be shown to exist, ‘free will’ is also absent and we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for our actions. I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian conception of free will but I still want to be involved in my decisions and choices, even if that is limited to an awareness.
But the self can be shown to exist, unless you deny the existence of subjectivity. this leads to hard determinism, what you referred to as no free will.
The productive, creative process itself, the drive to learn and be curious, to investigate, all of this leads to the conclusion that 1. There is some kind of greater will guiding us or 2. Humans have the ability to make determinations based on their experiences, and choose certain actions based on those experiences.
I’ve seen the deterministic argument that free will is an illusion caused by a chain of circumstances, but I don’t buy it. I think that the view that free will is an illusion is itself a logical error: the result of a dependence of the tendency of dualism to try and turn everything into objects, rather than seeing each object within its relationships, coming together to form a totality. This tendency leads to vulgar empiricism and positivist views. These views always obscure social relationships, which are real, measurable and predictions can be made based on them.
The “I’m so deep I’m a nihilist” trope has got to go. Every TV show or movie where there is some supposedly hyper intelligent character, they always have the most vile, garbage philosophy.
Dunbar’s number especially when used to contextualize the potential limits of human organization, such as relying only hiring friends and family. The chances that of the 200 people who probably know pretty well also happen to be the best candidate for an important task is low. Most exaggerating case of this is presidential nominees for positions. Like of course it’s the same guy for a few admins, it’s who they know that is remotely qualified.
I don’t know about favorite, but high on the mess-with-the-head factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion
Capgras delusion or Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, another close family member, or pet has been replaced by an identical impostor.[a] It is named after Joseph Capgras (1873–1950), the French psychiatrist who first described the disorder.
In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a “mirror image” or double dissociation of prosopagnosia, in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system which produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces.[21] This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not “quite right” about them. In 1997, Ellis and his colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic emotional arousal response.[22] The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients with the disease experience a “loss” of familiarity, not a “lack” of it.[23] Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition.[24] This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2001.[2]
I don’t have any specific Wikipedia article, but if you want more in depth reading material, Thinking Fast and Slow is probably the authoritative work on bias, by one of the central figures to the emergence of behavioral economics.
Misbehaving is another.
The vast majority of books I read that touch on decision making or bias cite at least one or Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler, and they’re both reasonably accessible. If you want something more accessible than that, Thinking in Bets covers similar ground. Annie Duke targets general audiences well, but all of her books also make her strong foundation in the field of psychology and what the research supports pretty clear.
Edit: You know what? I will pick one special one. Hindsight bias, or as Annie Duke calls it, resulting. A good decision doesn’t become a bad one when the result doesn’t work out the way you want. It is an opportunity to re-evaluate, and see if there were things you could have predicted given the information you reasonably had available at the time, but, you should do the same with decisions that work out. A good decision can result in a bad outcome and a bad decision can result in a good outcome. Make a continuous effort to improve your process, but separate the process from the results. Mortgaging your house to make a bet on the Super Bowl wasn’t genius if your team won.
