May 15 2012: Advertisers and governments use this bias a lot and I suspect that they use deliberate tactics to encourage and reinforce it. "Of course artificial sweetener is safe, look at these happy people dancing." "This war won't take long, we will get the bad guy and be home for summer." Perhaps this bias leads us to not be critical enough of the information we get. It's quite possible that this bias leads us to give greater weight to information telling us that something will have a positive outcome than information telling us that the same thing will have a negative outcome.
My question now is; Just how much does negative information need to outweigh positive information before we will consider it with equal merit?
May 15 2012: It seems that what hasn't been studied is peoples' love of their optimism bias. The bias allows people to enjoy their risk taking behaviour while maintaining a sense of safety. As such people are quite fond of their optimism bias and will defend it. However they won't usually do this by direct means. They will seek to debunk the arguments against their risk taking behaviour, confuse the subject or say they don't care about the risk. When really they do care about the risk but they just don't believe that it will happen to them and they don't want to be convinced that it could.
May 15 2012: Perhaps a young person learning to drive may have less chance of dying in a wreck if they were trained to be aware of their optimism bias.
I can't see that a scientist who is careful of safety would be any less innovative.
Our ideas and self expression are increasingly becoming the property of social networking sites through unfair terms of use that should be illegal.
Would we ever have allowed the telephone system to be put in place if all users had to sign over the right to record and use all conversations to the phone company? Why do we allow this on the net?
Jan 19 2012: The history of war has usually boiled down to powerful persons using disempowered persons to go out and obtain riches for them. This is just the automation of that process. Like in a factory; it's cheaper, more efficient and less objectionable.
If it was about saving lives you just wouldn't go to war, except to defend against an actual invasion of your borders ie: The Switzerland model - armed to the teeth and very prickly but otherwise neutral. However this is very bad for the business of war.
The only people who will see the end of senseless war will be those who refuse to participate in wars of profit and refuse to profit from wars.
TEDCred score: +0.40 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A comment on Talk: Tali Sharot: The optimism bias
My question now is; Just how much does negative information need to outweigh positive information before we will consider it with equal merit?
A comment on Talk: Tali Sharot: The optimism bias
A reply on Talk: Tali Sharot: The optimism bias
I can't see that a scientist who is careful of safety would be any less innovative.
A comment on Conversation: If you could open-source one piece of technology, what would you choose and why?
Our ideas and self expression are increasingly becoming the property of social networking sites through unfair terms of use that should be illegal.
Would we ever have allowed the telephone system to be put in place if all users had to sign over the right to record and use all conversations to the phone company? Why do we allow this on the net?
A comment on Talk: PW Singer on military robots and the future of war
If it was about saving lives you just wouldn't go to war, except to defend against an actual invasion of your borders ie: The Switzerland model - armed to the teeth and very prickly but otherwise neutral. However this is very bad for the business of war.
The only people who will see the end of senseless war will be those who refuse to participate in wars of profit and refuse to profit from wars.