There are so many cognitive biases that it is difficult to keep track of them. This article provides a chart of 50 well documented cognitive biases. Maybe I'll print out this chart and put it on my refrigerator for easy access . . .
As any science guy recognizes, evolution is a fact of life. If an environment is inhospitable to a population, that population dwindles and another prevails. Flu shots are designed every year to prevent the premier emerging strains that are likely to become dangerous, either through virulence in the body, or…
I wore two hats today at a presentation by two of my friends, Dan Rubright and Leslie Peters. I was already planning to attend the “The Hidden Jazz of Groups” presented in the Cortex District of St. Louis. Dan asked me whether I could also shoot some photos of the presentation, which sounded like fun.
Dan and Leslie, who are married to each other, have combined their skillsets into a way that celebrates both individual differences and the magic of collaboration. Dan, who is both an exquisite musician and an educator, began the session by giving his insight into the process of creating jazz, and then moved on to discuss the wide variety of creating and combining sounds to create music. Leslie, an author and speaker on group dynamics, then joined in. It was a smart and unintimidating way to broach the topic of efficient group dynamics. These are a few of my photos from the presentation.
If you click on the video, you'll hear Dan’s impromptu performance of some of his music. His style is truly his own. I’m always delighted by the amount of music he can coax out of a single guitar.
Today, I was thinking about Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I think of this book at least several times each week. It's got to be one of the most important books I have ever read, in that it identifies numerous ways in which people are unwittingly mislead by mental heuristics, i.e., by their intuitions and shortcuts. You might be a bigger threat to yourself than any outsider.
The solution to Kahneman's heuristics is seemingly that we should
be more careful or that we should train ourselves so that we are not mislead by these heuristics. Kahneman concludes, unfortunately, that heuristics are too strong to recognize in real time. He characterizes them to be like optical illusions. When we look at them over and over we will be fooled over and over.
Here is one of my favorite optical illusions: The Ames Window. My mind is intransigent. I can't unsee this illusion even though I know exactly what is going on.
Many (e.g., I've heard interviews by Sam Harris and Shane Parrish) have suggested to Kahneman that since we know about these systematic ways in which the mind runs off the rails, we can make adjustments. Kahneman will have none of it. "“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.” Kahneman writes further: "Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”
Or consider that Kahneman and Richard Nisbett seem to disagree on whether we can train out our systematic mistakes, yet this article ("The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your BrainScience suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?") suggests that we seem to be more easily trainable with regard to "easy problems."
This is nonetheless, discouraging, right? Maybe that's why it is a good idea to work with groups of people. Maybe someone else will catch your mistakes. And if not, maybe you can catch your mistakes in a post-mortem and then add your mistakes on your check list to help you for the next time the situation arises.
With this single question, Elizabeth Warren has precisely voiced the deep concerns of every honest and proficient trial lawyer in the United States:
At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?