Confirm Your Bias

I want to share with you an exercise in (cognitive) bias:

1) If you throw a piece of paper away, do you put it in the paper recycling bin? If that piece of paper e.g. tissue paper is soiled, do you then put it in the garbage? It’s still paper right, so why not put soiled tissue paper in the paper recycling bin?



2) Did you know that Pluto is no longer a planet? It was reclassified as a 'dwarf-planet'. But a dwarf-planet is still a planet right? Pluto was discovered in 1930, we have been calling it a planet for almost 100 years, but now the ‘experts’ say it is not a planet, but a ‘plutoid’ or dwarf planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto



3) Is Carbon Dioxide a pollutant? This one is important because it makes the difference between millions of dollars in taxes, or not. And YES — they will be coming out of your paycheck not the politicians’.

Can they tax the air we breathe?

Well if you redefine CO2 as a pollutant — they can and do.
CO2 has been around for a long time, and the last thousand years or more of human history, CO2 was NOT called a pollutant. For the last 10 or more years the definition has been wavering. Now however, with new motivation and a new agenda, Washington and Obama have definitively re-defined CO2 as a pollutant; regardless if manmade or naturally occurring.

Now the point of the questions above is not to prove any facts. You will not prove one single fact with them, but magically, what the 3 questions above really do — is reveal your biases.

Beware! Trying this on your family will result in heated debates, be ready!
If you are really feeling good about this try these two:

Syrian ‘Rebels’:
1) Really? When the US fights them in Iraq, they are called 'Insurgents' and it is not a revolution but an 'insurgency' or downright terror campaign.
2) There was no insurgency until the SAudis and Qataris started funding the 'rebels'.

CO2:
1) There was no reason to re-define CO2 until a certain agenda came along and some politicians needed the new definition to enable their tax scams.
2) Why re-define now?

In the cases above, you will see that the timing is more than dubious, it is actually incriminating.

In every political case, the timing is crucially important.

Some people will say you are being a pedantic-semantic fool for harping on your definitions, the people who say that however, are the ones who end up in 're-education camps' later, 'for their own good' ... of course.

The start of any project must be the definitions, make sure you get them right or you will pay dearly later on when it’s much too late, and never miss a chance to confront someone who is using semantics to rip you off.