Playing your Partisanship
It's election time in the US, and it's hard to avoid hearing all about it here in Canada (or, I presume, much of the rest of the world). I'm not exception to that as you can probably guess by my previous post. I've been interested to see a few of the psychological aspects of polarization, especially after the Australian elections earlier this year had similar, although to a lesser extent. Two particular stand out, and are worth looking at closer: 1A) Conspiracy theory: Bayes and Unwavering beliefs. Bayes theorem is some maths regarding probabilities: The interesting thing is that it can be used as a way to model how something (e.g. you, or your brain) can end up holding beliefs about how the world works based off experience. To reword the equation above in prose: How much I should believe that a hypothesis is true, given some evidence [ P(H | E) ], is equal to my old probability [ P(H) ] times the chance of seeing the evidence assuming it's true [ P(...