My favorite page on Wikipedia is their list of cognitive biases. I've gone to it probably a hundred times, each time trying to understand better what's so fascinating about it. My tentative conclusion is that I have a suspicion that all of our problems and questions are a result of the brain's attempt to be practical and efficient. Cognitive biases are the tools that allow us to make decisions, find patterns, and live in a world of ambiguity without being bogged down by infinite possibilities and paralysis. The cost, however, is that these biases are both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
During this series of posts, I'd like to walk through each of the biases one-by-one, in each case stating the bias, its strengths, and its weaknesses in the hopes that we can learn to recognize the tools that we use and learn when the tools might get in the way and harm us rather than help us.
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