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Showing posts from June, 2014

fatal miscellany

Somebody has written an ad campaign based, apparently, on famous destructive holes in human reason. Of course it makes perfect sense for gambling companies to glorify bad reasoning, but that fact made it no less surprising to see on the street. What have we here?: The fundamental attribution error . Base rate neglect . The introspection illusion, and, Dunning-Kruger . Illusory superiority; overconfidence in weak inductions . Fine, it's unintentional - certainly it's no more immoral than its parent industry - sure, cognitive bias is already so ubiquitous that mere positive PR is hard-pressed to make us worse at reasoning. But then they go and the perfunctory line at the bottom about 'responsible gambling'. A step beyond. ******************************************** Chuck Klosterman points out that, just in writing the above, I have fallen for modern advertising's core mechanism: get us talking even in the face of its meaninglessness . Our con