¡Bemsha SWING!: Another Cognitive Bias

2 jun 2011

Another Cognitive Bias

There is a cognitive bias that I'm not sure has a formal name. It is similar to the concept of "professional deformation." Basically, it is the bias toward one's own intellectual framework. An economist who sees everything in economic terms. A linguist who views everything as basically a problem of language, etc... In short, it is the tendency to overestimate the power of one's own academic discipline to explain everything. A kind of intellectual overreaching.

6 comentarios:

Zed dijo...: I would like to know if there's a term for this, I call it the hammer-and-nail effect but would like a fancier-sounding phrase. I have the impression that it happens a LOT in very technical fields, in which the investment of effort required to pick up a new perspective is large.; 8:27 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Yes, if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail. I'd like to have a better label for it. It's related to the bias that makes people think they are smarter and more competent than they really are.; 9:20 p. m.
Shedding Khawatir dijo...: Although I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the amount of information I feel like I should know, this is one reason I'm glad I'm in an interdisciplinary field. We're pretty much required to take different perspectives and consider approaches from diverse fields because it's quite clear that you need them all to explain complex phenomena, and even then it's hard. It helps protect against this type of bias, although it can still exist.; 11:43 p. m.
Andrew Shields dijo...: I don't know where I got the phrase from, but I use the French expression "deformation professionelle" to refer to this.

Specifically, since I teach English to German speakers, I always hear all the problems that German speakers have when they speak English, even if said speakers are so fluent that someone without my "deformation professionelle" would hear hardly any problems.

(But if I talk to a Spanish speaker speaking very good English, I don't hear the stubborn traces of Spanish that such a person finds hard to eliminate.); 1:28 a. m.
Anónimo dijo...: "Professional deformation" in action: http://xkcd.com/793/; 3:39 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: We use the phrase "deformación profesional" in Spanish too. I guess I'll have to use that until I think of something better.; 8:00 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

2 jun 2011

Another Cognitive Bias

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