flâneur

Motivated reasoning

blog.ploeh.dk · 764 words · saved by 1 readers

Most of my concerns about AI are probably irrelevant, but what if one of them is not? At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, epistemology, and political science, there's a concept called motivated reasoning. In short, it describes the tendency to arrive at desired conclusions by reasoning processes heavily influenced by individual motivations. An example is a person who finds reasons to

Most of my concerns about AI are probably irrelevant, but what if one of them is not? At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, epistemology, and political science, there's a concept called motivated reasoning. In short, it describes the tendency to arrive at desired conclusions by reasoning processes heavily influenced by individual motivations. An example is a person who finds reasons to keep smoking that convinces him- or herself: Perhaps the smoker gloms onto evidence that smoking reduces appetite, and might therefore reason that it's better to keep smoking, because quitting…

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