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Confirmation Bias

Edited by Yoav Ravid, Tofly, Ruby, et al. last updated 27th Feb 2023

Confirmation bias (also known as positive bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one's prior personal beliefs or hypotheses [1].  For example, one might test hypotheses with positive rather than negative examples, thus missing obvious disconfirming tests.

“I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” - Charles Darwin (autobiography)

See also: Motivated skepticism, Privileging the hypothesis, Falsifiability, Heuristics and Biases, Availability heuristic, Surprise, Narrative fallacy

External Links

  • Speculations on the Future of Science by Kevin Kelly
  • On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task by P.C. Wason
  • Write Your Hypothetical Apostasy by Nick Bostrom
  • Confirmation Bias, Wikipedia
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Posts tagged Confirmation Bias
151Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
Scott Alexander
4y
33
178Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
59
98Ideological Bayesians
Kevin Dorst
2y
5
51Case Study: Testing Confirmation Bias
gwern
13y
63
43Confirmation Bias As Misfire Of Normal Bayesian Reasoning
Scott Alexander
6y
9
37Sufficiently sincere confirmation bias is indistinguishable from science
Benquo
9y
19
20Subtle Forms of Confirmation Bias
abramdemski
8y
4
127Privileging the Hypothesis
Eliezer Yudkowsky
16y
130
97"Nahh, that wouldn't work"
lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
15y
50
77[Valence series] 3. Valence & Beliefs
Steven Byrnes
2y
12
37Confirmation Bias in Action
Jacob Falkovich
5y
1
16Navigating LLM embedding spaces using archetype-based directions
mwatkins
1y
4
8Linkpost: Choice Explains Positivity and Confirmation Bias
Gunnar_Zarncke
5y
0
239The Plan - 2022 Update
Ω
johnswentworth
3y
Ω
37
162Semantic Stopsigns
Eliezer Yudkowsky
18y
111
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