cognitive bias

A Veritasium video that runs the 2-4-8 rule-guessing puzzle on people to show how they test only examples that confirm their hypothesis. It uses this to illustrate confirmation bias and falsification.

A Veritasium video on survivor bias, explaining how an observed sample can be incomplete and skewed. It uses examples such as bombers and famous success stories.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.

A recording of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. He walks through a list of cognitive biases such as incentives, social proof, and overoptimism.

Derren Brown's TV special in which he convinces a person he has a system for predicting horse race winners, demonstrating how survivorship bias and selective outcomes can fake predictive powers.

A hidden-camera social experiment in a park where three people try to steal a bike in the open: a white teenager, a black teenager and a young woman. It records how bystanders react to each.

A Senate hearing clip in which Sen. Ted Cruz questions a Google executive about alleged political bias and censorship in Google's products. It is a short excerpt of congressional testimony from 2019.

A short Veritasium video explaining regression to the mean and how ignoring it leads to wrong conclusions about punishment versus reward, medical treatments and sports streaks. It uses the example of flight instructors who believed criticism works better than praise.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Julia Galef introduces the soldier versus scout metaphor for two approaches to thinking, using the Dreyfus Affair as the illustration. She argues the scout mindset leads to better judgment.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

A short clip from the BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker explains which kind of person reads which British newspaper. It is a satirical take on press readership and bias.

UnHerd interviews Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who explains why he no longer trusts the site he helped create. He argues that it has become biased and is no longer a neutral, open platform.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

A one-minute clip of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner delivering the line that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Moral philosopher James Flynn explains the Flynn effect, the steady rise of IQ scores across the 20th century. He argues the shift reflects a move toward abstract, hypothetical thinking as cognitively demanding professions grew.

Veritasium explores why the number 37 turns up so often, drawing on Tom Magliery's collection of 37 sightings and a poll of about 200,000 people asked to pick a random number. It covers how humans choose numbers and why 37 stands out.

A short excerpt of Noam Chomsky telling a BBC journalist that he does not accuse him of self-censorship. He argues that people who believed differently would not have been hired into that position.

A short 2009 amateur video showing an HP MediaSmart webcam whose face tracking follows a white face but fails to track a black face. The uploader presents it as humorous.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

A Veritasium explainer on how the brain works and how we learn. It is inspired by Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and covers System 1 and System 2 thinking and why harder learning builds skill.

Tobias Engel's 31C3 talk shows how weaknesses in the SS7 telephone signaling network let companies and attackers locate, track and manipulate phones from anywhere in the world, with precision down to about 50 meters.

Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Yapko draws on forty years of practice and research to explain skills that help people recover from, and even prevent, depression. He emphasizes cognitive and social factors beyond medication.

Kathy Sierra's Fluent 2015 keynote on the one metaskill for developers: the ability to come up to speed quickly and stay there. She covers how people learn, cognitive resources versus willpower, and building skill.

Steve Hsu's 2011 Google Tech Talk reviews psychometric measurement of intelligence and the heritability of adult IQ, then discusses genome-wide association studies seeking the genes behind cognitive ability.

Social psychologist Melanie Joy introduces the concept of carnism, the belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others.

A clip of Jordan Peterson arguing that IQ is a strong predictor of job market success and that more complex jobs demand higher cognitive ability. He discusses what this means for people left behind.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

The first episode of John Vervaeke's lecture series on the modern meaning crisis, tracing its history through philosophy, cognitive science, religion and psychology. It introduces the series and its themes.

Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.

Veritasium's Derek Muller gives a Perimeter Institute livestream on how AI might change teaching and learning. He draws on past technology shifts and cognitive science to argue that learning requires effortful repetition.

David Heinemeier Hansson explains what he learned about indoor air quality after his new house made his family sick. He covers CO2, VOCs, off-gassing, HVAC and ventilation, and cognitive effects, presented at a Basecamp meetup.

A clip from Yes Prime Minister in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a survey support or oppose national service. It is a short satirical scene.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

A 1996 BBC interview in which Noam Chomsky explains his propaganda model of the media to Andrew Marr, including how filters shape what journalists report and the role of self-censorship.

Joscha Bach's 31c3 talk argues that the mind should be understood as an information-processing system and that even the physical universe can be seen as computational. It tours the philosophy underlying artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

Chris Stucchio presents the ethical principles behind algorithmic decision making and shows with examples from lending, criminology and education that they cannot all be satisfied at once. The talk frames AI fairness as a set of quantitative tradeoffs.