Saturday, June 9, 2018

The TED Talks Cognitive Bias Experiment

With intent I have engaged in a probably ill advised experiment on YouTube.  Bad idea or not I have had some pretty remarkable results.  There is a link to the world of gematria so it’s on topic, just not the normal XXX=59, the shoehorned Freemasons, blah, blah, blah.  A case on the side of bad idea is that very unscientifically I didn’t plan out exactly what I wanted to accomplish and set rigid standards.  So as it is constantly morphing I have no idea what course I’m going to take.  I’ve already modified my plans a zillion times, which shouldn’t surprise me since there’s a wide variety of personalities that I’m dealing with.

As I tend to keep individual posts limited to what I judge to be a tolerable length these are getting split up into several.  Immediately after this intro I’ll put up one about a specific bias and then as time goes on just go with the flow as I intersperse it with what current logical fallacies are happenings in the gematria world.  I’m not trying to write the definitive work on cognitive bias, which is actually part of the whole experiment.  People have already judged me on extremely limited information with no idea on exactly what my motivation is or anything about me.  So instead of getting too far ahead of myself.  How I started.

YouTube, being somewhat broken and that being part of the experiment, suggested that after researching spam for Dan’s latest Organic Matrix story, decided I might want to watch some James Veitch videos on spam at the TED TALKS channel.  That was fine by me because they were hilarious.  Now that I watched those YouTube said, “Aha!  You just watched two TED TALKS videos!  Here’s some more you might like!”

Ok, some of these are science oriented and certainly a great change of pace compared to Anthony Bourdain being sacrificed to synch up to Batman kind of nonsense (yes, that is out there).  So I subscribed to the channel and exercised my right to simply not watch if the daily video(s) didn’t suit me.

During this time I had been experiencing some success with putting up some well received jokes on various chess video channels.  This is where my brain started kicking around the odd idea.  The most popular chess channel is more like a tight knit friendly gathering than a place to discuss serious implications of playing 27. Nxd5 instead of Ke8.  Pressing the 👍 is a given for almost anything not openly antagonistic and everybody pals around.  If nothing else, the gematria community is a close knit group of friends that will like ANY comment, no matter how ridiculous it is.  The difference is that in the chess videos saying, “I think Magnus Carlsen is the best!” doesn’t harm anyone.  Compared to “That little faggot David Hogg should be killed!” that you can find on conspiracy videos.

So what would happen if I started putting up jokes on TED? Where they seem a bit out of place like the James Veitch videos?  Can I get to the point where without any actual information about me other than a couple dozen words that people can act like the know all about me?

You betcha.

All it took was one “toilet humor” joke that I wasn’t even proud of, that I only put up for purposes of the experiment, and the floodgates opened and the wolves descended with people trying to correct me.  I’m wrong about EVERYTHING for just one set of sex puns, which considering the topic of the video was not totally off base.  But that’s another post.

Some of the basics in my limited scientific approach.
1). These people do not know and likely will never know that I’m researching cognitive biases.  I have been accused of being an attention whore.  Far from it.  I’m not trying to recruit readers from their fan base.  They hopefully don’t give a damn about gematria one way or the other.
2). Most of my jokes are purposefully not antagonistic.  Like, the lesbian father video, if I truly was looking to just be the king of toilet humor a comment about “having a gay time” watching it is an easy pun.  And, sadly as part of the experiment’s results so far probably would have gotten some “likes” on top of the proper reaction of telling me to shut the f up.  They range from somewhat thoughtful, which don’t go over to well (again, sadly) to mostly innocuous.
3). The jokes do relate to the current video only.  No trying to bring up the past, except one comment I deleted when I realized I was misstating my point.

So next up, the YouTube Alarm.

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