Re:Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports? (2017)
by Bartweiss on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @12:39PM
(#19028212)
Hm, lots of options going - negativity bias (bad stuff is more memorable), conservatism bias (low-frequency events are overestimated), availability heuristic (memorable events like misrepresentations are overstated).
Honestly though, I'm not sure I'd call it a bias in your observation so much as a sensible assessment of sources. A source that's right about 90% of topics is still misleading you quite often. And even worse, a source that's 90% accurate about each topic can leave you almost totally ignorant; there are a lot of stories where the entire message can be destroyed by any one of numerous errors.
(And of course, there's a pithy name for that too. "O-ring theory", after the Challenger shuttle disaster, describes phenomena where everything has to go right, so the failure chance at each step is multiplicative.)
Honestly though, I'm not sure I'd call it a bias in your observation so much as a sensible assessment of sources. A source that's right about 90% of topics is still misleading you quite often. And even worse, a source that's 90% accurate about each topic can leave you almost totally ignorant; there are a lot of stories where the entire message can be destroyed by any one of numerous errors.
(And of course, there's a pithy name for that too. "O-ring theory", after the Challenger shuttle disaster, describes phenomena where everything has to go right, so the failure chance at each step is multiplicative.)