Excellent summary of 20 cognitive biases by psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams.  His Intro:

The human mind is a remarkable piece of biological engineering. It’s capable of an astonishing range of feats like inventing calculus, composing rock operas, and putting spacecraft on other planets. But it’s also capable of an equally astonishing range of predictable reasoning errors. Psychologists call these cognitive biases, and they’re as common as the common cold.

In this post, I’ll outline 20 major biases that distort our judgments about evidence, ourselves, and the world. Once you learn about them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere: in politics, in the news, on social media – and occasionally even in your own thinking. (Mostly, though, in other people’s.)

And if you enjoyed these summaries of these cognitive biases, you’ll probably also enjoy this related article by Steve Stewart-Williams: One Bias to Rule Them AllAll cognitive biases = one of a handful of fundamental beliefs + confirmation bias.

Excerpt:

Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years, from hindsight bias to ingroup-outgroup bias to the fundamental attribution error. They’ve even proposed a bias bias: a tendency to overestimate the impact of cognitive biases on (other) people’s thinking. Inventing and cataloging biases seems to be one of psychologists’ favorite pastimes.

But a fascinating recent paper by Aileen Oeberst and Roland Imhoff argues that all our cognitive biases boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs, coupled with just one “ultimate” bias. The fundamental beliefs include such ideas as “I make correct assessments” and “I am good.” And the ultimate bias is confirmation bias: the tendency to seek and favor information consistent with one’s preexisting views.

In this post, I’ll look at a range of common cognitive biases, and the six fundamental beliefs that give rise to them.