[Book] Confirmation Bias and Sharp Shotter Effect

Confirmation bias
People are really good at recognizing patterns, even though a pattern isn’t a pattern. Once they find a pattern, it’s hard for them to let go. People tend to prove themselves correct, rather than find out the truth. This is called confirmation bias.

Sharpshooter effect
It’s just like having a mediocre sharpshooter shoots a blank paper, and draws a picture afterwards. Consider following random results. Do you see any pattern?

I don’t. But if you do, you may consider to work in forensics science or as a government agency.
Now let’s try again. I will just rearrange the above random string in a rectangle format. Here is the result:

Suppose the rectangle is a geographical area. If ‘1’ represents places where terrorism breaks out during the last few years. Then we might draw a conclusion that the left of the rectangle is a highly sensitive area. This experiment tells us that the pattern can be misleading. The location of sensitive areas may be just a random string crafted up to deceive authorities.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 9 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].


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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.