Revisiting the Error in Studies of Cognitive Errors

Question: Write a summary on revisiting the Error in studies of cognitive errors? Answer: The given article has been a real eye opener for a person like me who has always been a staunch believer of logic. While I always assumed without question that it is logic only which is objective and above linguistic and semantic barriers, the claims made in the article clearly question the underlying objectivity of logic as an all pervasive judgement tool. The article relates logic with human perception and since in perception there are always judgement errors due to the innate subjectivity, hence it also logically leads to subjectivity in logic which is disturbing to some extent. This is primarily because something (logic) which I have assumed to be infallible and open to interpretation is essentially a subjective phenomenon which depends on the circumstances and perception. The concept of good judgement errors is also engaging especially with the example of Post-It as it aims to establish that judgement errors are all too pervasive and thus need to be better understood. The author has also questioned the link of logic with rationality and in this manner questioned the relationship which I have innately assumed to be true because of the empirical instances regarding of the co-existence of the two. Further using data, the author also seems to question the impact of making representations differently on the way the information derived from these talks is eventually processed leading to multiple variants. Using the Wason selection task, it is apparently clear that logic is infallible and more importantly so subjective that makes it difficult to predict provided proper modelling has not been done. While the author reluctantly decides to assume that logic is free from the effect of semantics and representations but then is able to defy the same using valid arguments. The underlying cause for the same is convincing since it is attributed to the different manners in which information is processed by different human beings in different ways and hence the same information may lead to varied judgements and to call just one judgement as being correct and the remaining ones as being fallacious or dubious is a rather presumptive assumption. This idea actually appeals to me as I have seen in numerous instances when discussing something with friends, the conclusion they draw from a piece of information may be starkly different from mine but at the same time they may have an underlying logic as st rong as mine because essentially logic is a subjective thing which cannot be assumed to so objective as we see. I particular like the stance the author takes in the sense he is not against the existence of logic but the obsession with its objectivity and the biases and errors during its application. Further the obsession with logic as has been advocated by the author actually in counter-productive for the proponents of logic since during their application of logic with scant regard to the context and semantics has resulted in judgement bias being induced in their works. This is made apparent from the various interpretations of the overconfidence bias. I was surprised to learn about the better than average interpretation provided by the author as to how commonly we assume that the underlying distribution is symmetric and additionally it never comes to our mind (including mine) that the average we define for most is highly subjective and so is the final conclusion. Additionally the idea that relates overconfidence with narrow intervals and probabilistic distribution also are quite convincing and have forced me to avoid committing these errors in my life. Further the miscalibration bias introduced as interpretation of overconfidence is also intriguing since it clearly shows our casual usage of percentages and other quantification techniques without necessarily adhering to a uniform calibrating scale. Also from my experience, I now can say that we tend to over rely on these percentages and their underlying logic and subjectivity. In order to reduce these biases, the author has suggested usage of absolute risk rather than relative risk which makes sense since relative risk increases the level of subjectivity involved in the interpretation since no objective baseline is present. Further an ecological view of error is presented on the basis of findings of the research which make sense since logic should not be seen in isolation as a universal yardstick and instead it should be customised as per the content which enables it to maintain its underlying objectivity. Hence it becomes imperative to focus on the way things are presented and logic is applied so that the judgement errors are minimised.