Recency illusion. The recency illusion is the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when it is in fact long-established.
The term was invented by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University who was primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions. However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent". Linguistic items prone to the Recency Illusion include: "Singular they" - the use of they to reference a singular antecedent, as in someone said they liked the play.
SMART HEURISTICS. What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty.
Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? Judgemental Heuristics and Biases: Try these cases yourself.
A. A cab was involved in a hit-and-run accident. Two cab companies serve the city: the Green, which operates 85% of the cabs, and the Blue, which operates the remaining 15%. A witness identifies the hit-and-run cab as Blue. When the court tests the reliability of the witness under circumstances similar to those on the night of the accident, he correctly identifies the color of the cab 80% of the time and misidentifies it 20% of the time.
Heuristics “to learn by discovery” Heuristics. Heuristic Evaluation. July 6, 2014 Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
January 1, 1997 Discount usability engineering is our only hope. We must evangelize methods simple enough that departments can do their own usability work, fast enough that people will take the time, and cheap enough that it's still worth doing. The methods that can accomplish this are simplified user testing with one or two users per design and heuristic evaluation. Metaheuristic. Compared to optimization algorithms and iterative methods, metaheuristics do not guarantee that a globally optimal solution can be found on some class of problems.
Many metaheuristics implement some form of stochastic optimization, so that the solution found is dependent on the set of random variables generated. By searching over a large set of feasible solutions, metaheuristics can often find good solutions with less computational effort than can algorithms, iterative methods, or simple heuristics. As such, they are useful approaches for optimization problems. Several books and survey papers have been published on the subject. Properties and classification 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design. Heuristic. Heuristic (/hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery that gives a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal.
Where the exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, or common sense. In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.
10 More Common Faults in Human Thought. Humans This list is a follow up to Top 10 Common Faults in Human Thought.
Thanks for everyone’s comments and feedback; you have inspired this second list! It is amazing that with all these biases, people are able to actually have a rational thought every now and then. Name it and webbies will buy it. PENN STATE (US) — A new study suggests online consumers judge a site’s or a software’s credibility by its name—and the more specialized the better.
In an experiment, participants said they trusted websites, recommendation-providing software, and even computers labeled to perform specific functions more than the same Internet tools with general designations, says S. Shyam Sundar, a communications professor at Penn State. “In general, the attribution of specialization can increase the credibility of a product or any kind of object,” Sundar says. “It’s really how the human psyche works.”