Letters Remain

Tag: logical-fallacies

  • Derren Brown’s Bertram Effect Experiment Text

    I love the Bertram effect. It’s likely the cognitive bias / psychological experiment that I think of the most. While the text from the original experiment is good, it’s from 1948. In the brilliant Tricks of the Mind and his 2000s TV show of the same name, Derren Brown updated the experiment, using his own text (reproduced…

  • Bertram Forer Experiments: Your Personalised Generic Profile

    Here is the ‘personalised’ personality profile as used in a 1948 experiment by Bertram Forer: You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have…

  • Planning for the Worst Case Scenario

    Eliezer Yudkowsky on planning for the abyssal. Never mind hindsight on the real-estate bubble – there are lots of things that could potentially trigger financial catastrophes.  I’m willing to bet the American government knows what it will do in terms of immediate rescue operations if an atomic bomb goes off in San Francisco.  But if…

  • List of Logical Fallacies

    First cognitive science, now logic: a list of logical fallacies. A fallacy is a component of an argument which, being demonstrably flawed in its logic or form, renders the argument invalid in whole. I prefer the many informal fallacies: an important one of which is that correlation does not imply causation (cum hoc ergo propter…