Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias

Originally shared by Kevin Clarke (ksclarke)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078300/

Comments

  1. Geo. TirebiterFebruary 20, 2017 at 2:26 PM

    I seen this particular phenomenon in action on drug raids that I supervised. The drug dog team would not search without humans searching first because they didn't want the dog to be wrong. Hilarious. And, they "only work if they want." I thought the whole thing was bogus. They used to alert on money which we based our forfeiture on. I then learned that most $ in the US has traces of drugs on them, so whether or not it was true or not, the dogs never failed to alert on money, no matter where it came from. I was never impressed with scent dogs, and their handlers knew because I gave them sarcastic looks and remarks as they did their "work."

    I felt the same way about polygraph operators. I used to routinely influence the results by telling the operators what I thought of the person to be tested, as in "I think this guy is a lying sh*t" or "this is is telling the truth, I believe." And sure enough the tests went my way. I didn't believe in them at all once a cop friend of mine was ostracized and passed over for promotion because he failed a test when he was working as a rookie and was accused of stealing bail money. 10 years later the actual thief, an ex-cop working on that day, confessed to the crime.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Entremet

Entremet Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh "“Like most people in the US, I grew up knowing the words to this carol and even (shudder) singing them occasionally (singing is not a strong point of mine), but never really thought about what they meant, how the carol originated, or what birds were involved”, says Dr Rasmussen in email. So she decided to figure it out. Dr Rasmussen, who’s tied for third for the most bird discoveries in the world, is probably also the world’s foremost avian sleuth, due to her meticulous detective work a few years ago that uncovered the many ornithological thefts and records frauds in museums that were committed by eminent British ornithologist, Richard Meinertzhagen. But who would ever have thought that an old Christmas carol might also hold an avian mystery? “After all, it’s just a Christmas carol!” Dr Rasmussen points out." https://medium.com/@GrrlScientist/meet-the-real-birds-of-the-twelve-days-of-christmas-fame-grrlscientist-5a8bc09350c9
Read more

Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious

Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh "Renowned children's author and occasional spy, Roald Dahl spent the last years of his life in a home located in the small English village of Great Missenden, and now his beloved village is home to an attractive museum devoted to his life and works.  [...] Today the museum holds all of Dahl's original manuscripts, as well as his "Idea Books" where he would jot down his nascent creations. In addition to celebrating his writing career, there are also displays covering his service in the RAF. However, the crown jewel of the museum is the recreation of Dahl's purpose built "Writing Hut," complete with the arm chair he had customized to write in." http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-roald-dahl-museum
Read more

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh So Labradors tend to overeat. Now it has been traced to genetic differences. "Dr Eleanor Raffan, a veterinary surgeon and geneticist who studies how genes influence metabolism at the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge recently published a study that examines the genetics that underlie food motivation and obesity in Labrador retrievers. [...] When Dr Raffan and her team carefully examined this POMC gene variant, they found that a small 14-basepair section a little more than halfway down the gene’s length was missing. This deletion creates a frameshift mutation that results in the production of an abnormal protein where the last half is scrambled into a blob of nonsense [...]. Normally, the POMC is translated into the POMC pro-peptide, which is cleaved at precise sites to give rise to number of smaller peptides, including the appetite suppressing neuropeptides, ß-MSH & ß-endorphin, but the abnormal POMC pro-peptide do...
Read more