Confirmation Bias

Definition of Insanity?

Image by Wordswag - words by Michael de Groot

Saturday 31st October, Halloween 2020.

The Grim Reaper himself made an appearance on TV, to ruin people’s outlook for Christmas.

[embed]https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1322611182470127621?s=20[/embed]

Uk Government ministers have been defending the England Tier system and have been in denial for weeks that cases would run out of control across the country.

Yet again leaving it too late to take decisive action, meaning that England has to go on another lockdown, supposedly this time for just 4 weeks. I don’t believe for a second that 4 weeks will solve things. I predicted months ago that households will not be allowed to mix over Christmas and this is now 100% on track.

Human nature means that we’re always more optimistic about the future compared to how things truly will work out. This is an excellent and very detailed article about ‘Confirmation Bias’ in the main.


Chris Anderson of TED.com interviews Larry Brilliant, actually very early on during the Pandemic in April 2020.

And here is his 2006 Ted Talk.


When will the pandemic be over?

Consider the following scenario: a highly infectious, sometimes deadly respiratory virus infects humans for the first time. It spreads rapidly worldwide, and the WHO declares a pandemic. The death toll starts to rise and everyone is asking the same question: when will the pandemic end? Alex Rosenthal details the three main strategies governments can use to contain and end a pandemic in the Ted Animation below.


This Pandemic is a 3–5 year journey at least for the U.K. and the developed western world. Asia have culture already well established with fighting viruses, after all they had to contend with SARS-1 and have been used to wearing masks for decades. They also decided to close borders. The U.K. totally ignored this but and continue to believe that we have to keep the borders open for economic reasons.

The fact is that by keeping the borders open for so long means you are damaging the economy not helping it.

The U.K. Tory (Conservative) government are nearly as mad as the current US administration just a smudge away from being as insane as Trump and his fellow crooks.

Vaccines are not the panacea that everyone hopes for. 60% of the population are not prepared to inject their bodies with poisons. Any-bodies are something different providing they’ve been extensively tested on already very sick patients in hospital.

We have to become more realistic in our outlook instead of optimistic, which we are currently.

Plan for a long journey ahead with many false promises, many failures, more fake news etc.

Just be realistic!

Michael de Groot

Tribe

We love belonging to tribes. It all starts with your family tribe, then your school tribe and continues into your educational tribes as you progress through to the sports tribe, the political tribe and your workplace tribe.

And you enjoy belonging to these tribes because it allows you to view those folks as like minded individuals. They may be from different families and backgrounds but when you arrive in their tribe, you are basically the same as them. You look at these people through rose-tinted spectacles, believing that they own the same values as you.

You probably have no idea about this person and quite possibly have never met them ever and truly no idea what they stand for, their values and habits. But because they belong to the same tribe, well that means they are like you? This is especially true of Facebook. Belong to the same group around just one idea and bang, you are now the best buddies forever.

Wrong!

This can also be understood as ‘confirmation bias’.

[embed]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias[/embed]

We believe certain things about ourselves and others and if there’s a match then we believe we’ve arrived in our tribe.

But belonging to a tribe can have many positive benefits. I recently listened to an episode of a podcast series on the BBC, titled ‘Digital Human’. The episode was indeed called ‘Tribe’.

[embed]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias[/embed]

In their research they were able to uncover that Facebook was hugely beneficial for extended families to keep in touch with each other, especially if they have been apart for long periods of time. Their meeting up after a long period apart was stronger because they could keep in touch with their family tribe.

Happy belonging!

Michael de Groot