I have been repeatedly accused by a GM commenter of stalking because I stood up to him multiple times. I've seen two other people make a similar claim in the past few days, for the crime of repeated commenting on GM sites, often with a demand to stop. Let's unpack this shit.


SEXPAND
One of the things that is most interesting to me about cognitive biases is that they exist for a reason. The way that we store and retrieve memories involves shortcuts that allow us to make safer decisions in times of panic. Evolutionarily speaking, this is extremely beneficial, allowing us to quickly decide upon a course of action by limiting the amount of information that we have to process. They become cognitive biases when we don't realize that we are employing those shortcuts in non-panic situations, leading us to a conclusion based on misinformation from our own brains.

Being aware of cognitive biases and how you may be committing them helps you detect when you are being affected by them, which is important because it's really tempting to accept the shortcut at face value. In times of panic, we need to make fast decisions; in other times, we need to made accurate decisions. Cognitive biases are often cases where we use the fast-decision-making ability of our brains when we need to be using the accurate-decision-making ability of our brains; being aware of our biases helps us detect when we have done that and adjust our reaction accordingly.

Anchoring, Negativity Bias, and Availability Heuristic

Have you ever noticed that when you get in a fight with someone that you love, you remember it in great detail, but you can't remember what the two of you ate for dinner last Tuesday? The difference is anchoring and negativity bias. Anchoring is our natural tendency to remember information that we deem "important" and negativity bias is the method by which we deem emotional charged negative information to be "important." In evopsych terms, you can think about anchoring and negativity bias this way:

More;

http://groupthink.jezebel.com/falsely-claiming-cyberstalking-as-a-silencing-techniq-1504707694/@burtreynoldsismyspiritguide1