mind traps

Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.

the brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more procedures, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly.

When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person can ... See more

The implication of these studies is that this so-called “selective exposure bias” may be pushing us into more polarised positions.

Publication bias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientific literature is full of positive results. Null or negative results have traditionally been hard to publish and are often relegated to abandoned hard drives, despite the fact that they represent valuable knowledge claims. Research users looking for evidence get a distorted view, which — like Joh... See more

Zero-risk bias is a tendency to prefer the complete elimination of risk in a sub-part over alternatives with greater overall risk reduction.[1] It often manifests in cases where decision makers address problems concerning health, safety, and the environment.[2] Its effect on decision making has been observed in surveys presenting hypothetical scena... See more

A Rube Goldberg machine , named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.

The urge to blame is based . . . on the fear of being blamed

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by th... See more