Cognitive Bias
Cognitive Bias is a known error in the thinking process. These are generally caused by brain using shortcuts to process large amount of inputs.
Every cognitive bias is there for a reason - primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs(resulting mental errors) that they introduce.
Cognitive Biases mainly addresses these issues...
- Information overload - Our brain filters out information that it thinks is not important. There is too much information available - its not practical to process all of it.
- Need for meaning - The world is too complex to understand fully. So we compensate by filling in the gaps of our understanding to make better sense of it - or at least have a belief that we have an understanding of the world. We assign meaning to the world - we do our own sense making.
- Need to act fast - We evolved with the need to make quick decisions when faced with limited time and information. This programming continues in the present time in form of these cognitive biases.
- Deciding what to remember - We have to prioritise what to remember and what to discard. We have a set of filters that will help us do this - but it can cause issues too.
Everything I have learned about Cognitive Biases is recorded in the Thinking Flaws site.