In this episode of Mentally Unscripted, Paul and Scott discuss using disconfirming evidence and falsifiability to overcome confirmation bias.

Resources:
[Confirmation Bias: Why Your Decisions Suck, and You Fight With Your Friends](https://strengthandreason.com/confirmation-bias)
[Use Disconfirming Evidence to Make Your Decisions Suck Less](https://strengthandreason.com/disc-evi)
Judgment in Managerial Decision Making
Probabilistic Thinking

Top Takeaways:
1. Humans tend to look only for confirming evidence. But often, we need disconfirming evidence to find the correct solution to a question.
2. Disconfirming evidence is better to use when examining a belief because it uses deductive logic instead of inductive logic.
3. Understanding the risk posed by COVID is complicated by the lack of unfiltered, scientific data that gives a level-headed view of the situation.

Timestamps:
[0:00] Discussion of Idiocracy – is it fiction or a documentary?
[4:42] What is confirming and disconfirming evidence?
[7:07] A study demonstrating the value of disconfirming evidence.
[10:56] People tend to avoid using disconfirming evidence because it takes more resources than seeking out confirming information.
[13:08] Falsifiability, the problem of induction, and deductive reasoning.
[18:03] Unfalsifiable claims may still be true. We just can’t falsify them.
[21:18] Applying disconfirming evidence and falsifiability to COVID.
[21:32] The debate over using masks to protect against COVID’s spread
[25:32] One factor complicating an analysis is that people aren’t good at assessing risk.
[28:35] Statistics are unreliable because they are difficult to measure and driven by incentives other than public health.
[35:05] As a population, we need to ask better questions and be literate in the concept of falsifiability.

Catch the full episode at Mentally Unscripted [Ep31 - Disconfirming Evidence and Falsifiability: The Two Most Powerful Mental Tools You’re Not Using]( https:// bit.ly/disconfirm)

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