Cognitive biases

If you've ever stumbled upon Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases you might feel like you've unlocked the secrets of human psychology. It suddenly provides a rich vocabulary for the entire catalog of your life's poor judgments and all the stupid arguments you've had with friends and colleagues over the years.

At the same time there is a reason these biases exist, and they're not categorically bad. It's what separates us from the robots. On the one hand, I would argue that in our increasingly complex and automated world, the price of making important decisions based on cognitive biases is increasingly costly. It's our feeling/emotional brain in the drivers seat. (Suggested reading: Everything is Fucked)

On the other hand, as humans we are faced with decisions and value judgments every day of our lives, and we simply don't have the time or energy to make a logical thought-out decision or judgment about everything, or the opportunity cost of doing so is just not worth it. (Suggested reading: Blink, Talking with Strangers, Thinking Fast & Slow) Our biases are also evolutionary shortcuts that are good enough most of the time and keep us alive.

...errors can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of System 2. As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical. Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high. The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.

— Danny Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Slow