Confirmation biasClub you made a very interesting point. Most of these shorts bashers are showing classic form of confirmation bias. I deal with this regularly when investigating error at my organizational. In my Industry which is aerospace we have to put process in place to combat this. This is a big issue in high skill high human performance work. This is part of human factor. A good recent example which grab headline was air canada plane almost landing on San Fran airport taxi way instead of on the runway. Pilots could see lights of aircraft on taxi way but ignored it until last minute because the instruments they used to align the plane during landing check earlier didn’t flag an issue. Below is good explanation of what confirmation bias is from Wikipedia.
Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias,[Note 1] is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.[1] It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biasedway. The effect is stronger for emotionallycharged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia.
People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization(when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. However, even scientists can be prone to confirmation bias.[2]
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts.[3][4]