Confirmation bias without rhyme or reason

Rhyme or reason: RNA-arginine interactions and the genetic code.

Theories about the origin of the genetic code require specific recognition between nucleic acids and amino acids at some stage of the code's evolution. A statistical analysis of arginine-binding RNA aptamers now offers the opportunity to test such interactions and provides the strongest support for an intrinsic affinity between any amino acid and its codons.

Evidence of gravitational waves, or evidence of confirmation bias?

On February 11 2016 the LIGO Scientific Collaboration announced the discovery of gravitational waves. Their announcement has been met with a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm by the scientific community. However, a careful and detailed analysis of the published papers, and other internal LIGO documents, reveal critical scientific methodology problems and unresolved questions surrounding t...

Evaluating Scientific Research in the Context of Prior Belief: Hindsight Bias or Confirmation Bias?

When there is a mismatch between new evidence and prior beliefs, do people reject the conclusions from this evidence because of confirmation bias or do they support them because of hindsight bias? Ninety-four participants expressed a belief about a study’s outcome before reading a research report. When belief was confirmed, the study’s methodology was subsequently rated more positively and find...

Intelligence Without Reason

Computers and Thought are the two categories that together de ne Arti cial Intelligence as a discipline. It is generally accepted that work in Arti cial Intelligence over the last thirty years has had a strong in uence on aspects of computer architectures. In this paper we also make the converse claim; that the state of computer architecture has been a strong in uence on our models of thought. ...

Disfluency disrupts the confirmation bias