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πŸ”— List of Cognitive Biases

πŸ”— Lists πŸ”— Philosophy πŸ”— Philosophy/Logic πŸ”— Business πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Cognitive science

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.

Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Some are effects of information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise, or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Both effects can be present at the same time.

There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. However, this kind of confirmation bias has also been argued to be an example of social skill: a way to establish a connection with the other person.

Although this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some findings that demonstrate bias have been found in non-human animals as well. For example, loss aversion has been shown in monkeys and hyperbolic discounting has been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.

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πŸ”— Atlantropa

πŸ”— Architecture

Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa, was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea devised by the German architect Herman SΓΆrgel in the 1920s and promoted by him until his death in 1952. Its central feature was a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have provided enormous amounts of hydroelectricity and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by up to 200 metres (660Β ft), opening up large new lands for settlement, for example in the Adriatic Sea. The project proposed four additional major dams as well:

  • Across the Dardanelles to hold back the Black Sea
  • Between Sicily and Tunisia to provide a roadway and further lower the inner Mediterranean
  • On the Congo River below its Kwah River tributary to refill the Mega-Chad basin around Lake Chad providing fresh water to irrigate the Sahara and creating a shipping lane to the interior of Africa
  • Suez Canal extension and locks to maintain Red Sea connection

SΓΆrgel saw his scheme, projected to take over a century, as a peaceful European-wide alternative to the Lebensraum concepts that later became one of the stated reasons for Nazi Germany's conquest of new territories. Atlantropa would provide land and food, employment, electric power, and most of all, a new vision for Europe and neighbouring Africa.

The Atlantropa movement, through its several decades, was characterised by four constants:

  • Pacifism, in its promises of using technology in a peaceful way;
  • Pan-European sentiment, seeing the project as a way to unite a war-torn Europe;
  • Eurocentric attitudes to Africa (which was to become united with Europe into "Atlantropa" or Eurafrica), and
  • Neo-colonial geopolitics, which saw the world divided into three blocsβ€”America, Asia, and Atlantropa.

Active support was limited to architects and planners from Germany and a number of other primarily northern European countries. Critics derided it for various faults, ranging from lack of any cooperation of Mediterranean countries in the planning to the impacts it would have had on the historic coastal communities left stranded inland when the sea receded. The project reached great popularity in the late 1920s to the early 1930s, and for a short period again, in the late 1940s to the early 1950s, but soon disappeared from general discourse again after SΓΆrgel's death.

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πŸ”— E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

πŸ”— Linguistics πŸ”— Linguistics/Applied Linguistics πŸ”— Languages πŸ”— Constructed languages πŸ”— English Language

E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes denoted Γ‰ or Eβ€²) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms.

Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. A number of other scholars have criticized E-Prime's utility.

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πŸ”— Lamest Edit Wars

πŸ”— Department of Fun


Occasionally, even experienced Wikipedians lose their heads and devote every waking moment to edit warring over the most trivial thing, wasting time debating topics of no practical value, or wrestling over questions whose answers hold no practical consequence. This page documents our lamest examples. It isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it serves as a showcase of situations where people lose sight of the big picture and obsessively expend huge amounts of energy fighting over something that, in the end, isn't really so important.

Edit warring is believed by some to be important, possibly due to the historical regularity and frequency of the occurrence of these wars. A careful and scholarly study of available archeological evidence has even suggested that edit wars may have recurred on a regular basis going back all the way to the beginning of recorded history, even before the advent of proper writing circa 2001 C.E. (see Wikipedia). In some earlier instances of edit warring, dating back from before the good old days, participants would simply utilize their swords and fight a battle, or later, their guns and fight a duel.

In modern times, physical combat has been outlawed and replaced by the careful inciting of personal attacks, strategic 3RR templating and canvassing, timely notices on WP:AN/I, and (in some cases) marking the changes as a minor edit. Truly, the revolutionary Wikipedia outlook has changed the way things get done. It has changed them from actually getting done to never getting done. On the other hand, nobody gets dispatched (so far!).

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πŸ”— Low-Background Steel

πŸ”— Metalworking πŸ”— Materials

Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low-background steel is so-called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides.

The primary source of low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test, most famously the scuttled German World War I warships in Scapa Flow.

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πŸ”— The German tank problem

πŸ”— Mathematics πŸ”— Germany πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Statistics πŸ”— Military history/Intelligence πŸ”— Military history/World War II πŸ”— Military history/German military history πŸ”— Military history/European military history

In the statistical theory of estimation, the German tank problem consists of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement. In simple terms, suppose we have an unknown number of items which are sequentially numbered from 1 to N. We take a random sample of these items and observe their sequence numbers; the problem is to estimate N from these observed numbers.

The problem can be approached using either frequentist inference or Bayesian inference, leading to different results. Estimating the population maximum based on a single sample yields divergent results, whereas estimation based on multiple samples is a practical estimation question whose answer is simple (especially in the frequentist setting) but not obvious (especially in the Bayesian setting).

The problem is named after its historical application by Allied forces in World War II to the estimation of the monthly rate of German tank production from very few data. This exploited the manufacturing practice of assigning and attaching ascending sequences of serial numbers to tank components (chassis, gearbox, engine, wheels), with some of the tanks eventually being captured in battle by Allied forces.

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πŸ”— Phoebus Cartel

πŸ”— Technology πŸ”— Business πŸ”— Electronics πŸ”— Energy πŸ”— Home Living

The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs. Corporations based in Europe and America founded the cartel on January 15, 1925 in Geneva. They had intended the cartel to last for thirty years (1925 to 1955). The cartel ceased operations in 1939 owing to the outbreak of World War II. The cartel included manufacturers Osram, General Electric, Associated Electrical Industries, and Philips, among others.

The Phoebus cartel created a notable landmark in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence to generate repeated sales and maximize profit. It also reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost fifteen years. Critics accused the cartel of preventing technological advances that would produce longer-lasting light bulbs. Phoebus based itself in Switzerland. The corporation named itself PhΕ“bus S.A. Compagnie Industrielle pour le DΓ©veloppement de l'Γ‰clairage (French for "Phoebus, Inc. Industrial Company for the Development of Lighting").

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πŸ”— Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Marketing & Advertising πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Free and open-source software πŸ”— Open πŸ”— Microsoft

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

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πŸ”— Impossible color

πŸ”— Color

Impossible colors (forbidden, non-physical, unrealizable or chimerical colors) are supposed colors that do not appear in ordinary visual functioning. Non-physical colors are those notionally resulting from combinations of retinal outputs which cannot arise in normal vision. Chimerical colors are perceived, typically transiently, through contrast effects.

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πŸ”— Crown shyness

πŸ”— Agriculture πŸ”— Plants πŸ”— Forestry

Crown shyness (also canopy disengagement, canopy shyness, or intercrown spacing) is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps. The phenomenon is most prevalent among trees of the same species, but also occurs between trees of different species. There exist many hypotheses as to why crown shyness is an adaptive behavior, and research suggests that it might inhibit spread of leaf-eating insect larvae.

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