
Autobiographical memory is typically biased toward positive events - laurex
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-31742-001
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msgilligan
We can thank our lucky stars that the universe at least gave us that. Could
you imagine the other way around?

~~~
rl3
> _Could you imagine the other way around?_

Many of us don't have to.

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aasasd
Couldn't have asked for a better answer to “is my brain doing something wonky
or am I just an edgy slacker?”

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acjohnson55
When I was a public school teacher in Baltimore (ten years later, I still
start so many of my sentences this way), I would have days that were
completely insane. One of my many responsibilities was to call parents to
discuss behavior issues at the end of the day.

I realized at some point that I was literally forgetting what happened. I took
anecdotal notes to be able to accurately describe behavioral situations, and
rereading them mere hours later, I couldn't actually autibiographically recall
many of these incidents.

I think it's what allowed me to have normalish evenings after insane work
days. Otherwise, the stress would be completely overwhelming.

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kranner
Ted Chiang's short story 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' is very
relevant.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling)

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lkrubner
This can lead to bias about whole categories of experience, for instance,
starting a business. If you only hear the success stories then you start to
think it is easy. You might intellectually be aware that 90% of all businesses
fail, but that anecdote doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as hearing
people’s joyful stories of success. That’s why I think it is important that we
document some of the failures and we do it while the memories are still fresh
and when we still have access to documents such as email and Slack messages
that can offer the gritty details of what went wrong. That ideal if accuracy
and specifics are very much what guided me when I wrote this:

[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/0998997617/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=smashcompany-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=2292ad04b2b6e409785d2e4cdd570c70&creativeASIN=0998997617)

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thewhitetulip
Of course it is. The people who write autobiography are the ones who are
telling their own story. They are heavily invested in telling only the good
parts.

Which is why I liked Warren Buffet's approach, let the writer write after
talking with people. No interference. Of course, his is a biography.

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danhak
This article is about autobiographical memory / recall, not autobiography as a
genre of literature.

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thewhitetulip
Isn't autobiography a written account of autobiographical memory?

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saurik
No: one could easily imagine a world where you remember all of the bad stuff,
but are still incentivized to not write it down; an autobiography is an edited
work of text, while autobiographical memory is a capability of a human.

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thewhitetulip
Yet autobiography is written by the person telling her own story.

You could remember bad stuff but you are not incentized to write it down.

Then how are they both different?

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scarejunba
Dude, it's saying the things you remember about your history are biased
positive. There is no writing down, there is no telling, there is no other
person involved here. _You_ are remembering your own past. In this past story,
you bias positive in the things you remember.

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thewhitetulip
And when you remember it positively, would it not translate to written
autobiographical accounts to be biased?

Won't there be a correlation?

Or am I missing something?

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pdpi
Your memories are a function of what actually happened. What you write is a
function of what you remember. Two separate processes.

Bias on how you retell your own story is, as you say, a fairly obvious
concern, so (for the purposes of this discussion) written autobiographies
being biased is completely uninteresting.

Rather, it's the fact that your recollection of events biases towards the
positive that's the novel, interesting information.

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thewhitetulip
So you agree there is a correlation and yet you somehow disagree with me.
Let's agree to disagree

