Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions. As a result, people recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way, in particular for emotionally significant issues and established beliefs. Biased search, interpretation and recall have been invoked to explain
attitude polarization (disagreeing parties diverging further when they are exposed to the same evidence),
belief perseverance (beliefs persisting after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the
primacy effect (data encountered early in a series being given more weight) and
illusory correlation (people falsely perceiving an association between two events or situations). Explanations for these biases include
wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. This can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military and political contexts. (Full article...)
... that the US Special Envoy for Afghan women and girls, Rina Amiri, is a former refugee who told US Senator
John Kerry that "the Afghan population is not the Taliban"?
... that sales declined after Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? was renamed by its American publisher, so the original title was restored in subsequent editions?
... that model Patsy Pulitzer was called one of the "World's Loveliest Sportswomen" after catching a 1,230-pound (560 kg) black marlin, a then world-record fish for a woman?
1759 –
Seven Years' War: At the Battle of Lagos, British ships, having damaged several French vessels the previous day, pursued the remainder of the fleet to
Lagos, Portugal, and continued the battle there in violation of Portuguese neutrality.
The discography of mewithoutYou, an American
rock band, includes seven studio albums, a live album, and seven
extended plays. The band was formed in 2001 as a side project to The Operation, an alternative band active from 1999 to 2001 that shared most of its members with mewithoutYou. The first undisputed release by the band was I Never Said That I Was Brave which was released on Kickstart Audio in 2001. Over the next year, the band signed to
Tooth & Nail Records and released their debut album, [A→B] Life. Brother, Sister and It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright, mewithoutYou's third and fourth studio albums, moved away from the
emo and
hardcore-punk influences of their earlier work and featured less abrasive vocals by Aaron Weiss. The band left Tooth & Nail in 2011 and released their fifth album, Ten Stories, a
concept album about the crash of a circus train, on their own Pine Street Records in 2012. In 2018, mewithoutYou released their final studio album, [Untitled], and their only live album, [A→B] Live. The band announced that they will disband at the conclusion of their farewell tour on August 20, 2022. (Full list...)
The Hunting of the Snark is a
nonsense poem by the English writer
Lewis Carroll, telling the story of ten characters who cross the ocean to hunt a mysterious creature known as the Snark. The poem was published in 1876 with illustrations by
Henry Holiday. This is the tenth plate from his illustrations, accompanying "Fit the Eighth: The Vanishing", in which things end badly for the Baker, one of the hunters:
In the midst of the word he was trying to say In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away— For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
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