Former technology executive now focused more on cognitive science and neuropsychology activities. Most of the time I work with teams on decision making and cognitive bias training (at decisionintel.co) and then use that work to fund critical thinking training for high school and university students. In my spare time I work on alternativemind.org, a research body established to study consciousness in synthetic environments. I’ve also published fiction and non-fiction for various publications, some good, some bad.
Brad Dunn
Karma: 85
Honestly it just comes down to manufacturing and the qty in the print run. In this first print, I made a pretty limited number to just test the waters out. I’m just a student right now and didn’t want to print thousands of these things so the cost is a bit higher than it would be if I were to print, say, 2000 copies or something which would drop the per unit cost down a lot.
You make a great point here. I will update this.
There are 187 biases in the deck, and 45 cards related to the game (so player cards, scenarios, things like that).
Yeah its certainly an interesting one. I’ve found myself (since I’ve spent weeks working on the deck and just talking about these biases) noticed myself, in moments, recognising certain biases and fallacies emerge when people talk, or even when I talk. Like I’ll. catch myself being like—I think I’m using an authority bias here—and I would say I do this ‘more’ after having worked on the game than before it.
So the gun is one of the images from one of the cognitive biases in the deck, that relates to illusory correlations. It comes from the correlational misunderstanding example often cited that goes something like this.
In Chicago, gun violence tends to get up in summer. Also, ice-cream sales increase in summer. Therefore, increases in ice-cream cause gun violence.
The gun, in this instance, if you look carefully, is made of ice-cream.
This feels very timely for me. My partner has suffered from chronic back pain (out of nowhere) for the last few years and we’ve been experimenting with various PRP, Glucose injections which have sadly, not provided the relief she needed.
I spend a great deal of time studying neuropsychology for uni and have been talking to some of the doctors about some cognitive options but it has mostly fallen on deaf ears. Your post made me buy that book—so thank you. I think we’re going to give it a go, if nothing happens, we are no worse off.
Also worth mentioning this concept “Value learning” is called out specifically in Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, with the use of the envelope puzzle which goes a little something like this; “Suppose we write down a description of a set of values on a piece of paper. We fold that paper and put it in a sealed envelope. We then create an agent with human-level general Intelligence and give it the following final goal; Maximize the realisation of the values described in the envelope.”
We have been playing around with this stuff (for another project). As in, recording conversations and then trying to mark out the instances of the fallacies and biases. Its not highly accurate right now, but we’re trying to turn it into something a bit more fun / usable. But like you said, the biases / fallacies are just a small, discrete part of the whole story really. But we wanted to start somewhere.