What happens when your beliefs can’t change?

August 13, 2024

This is part 2 in my series about "anchor beliefs" - but you don't need to read part 1 in order to understand it. I think that almost everyone has beliefs that are essentially unchangeable. These don't feel to us like beliefs but like incontrovertible truths. Counter-evidence can't touch them. They are beliefs we can't change our mind about. I call these "Anchor Beliefs." When Anchor Beliefs are false, we distort reality to fit them. So, what distortions do some reasonably common Anchor B...

Mistakes Made by Minds and Machines

May 3, 2021

Written: May 3, 2021 | Released: July 16, 2021 Fascinatingly, human minds and machine learning algorithms are subject to some of the same biases and prediction problems. This is probably not a coincidence - learning has fundamental challenges. Here is a list of some issues that afflict both minds and machines: 1. Recency Bias For both humans and machine learning algorithms, the most recently processed information tends to override what was learned from older data. This is sensibl...