human biases — 9 to 43 i counted at the desk

human biases, plural, sounded like the kind of thing you could collect neatly in a binder with little tabs. i checked. by my own count, i have somewhere between nine and forty-three of them on file, depending on how generous the textbook definitions are willing to be with me on a given afternoon.

11:23, a thursday. the small printer behind me has stopped pretending. carla is downstairs at the vendor demo nobody volunteered to attend, which buys me, in fair accounting, the rest of the morning before someone wonders why my screen is full of paragraphs and not the deck.

the deck, since you asked, is two slides and a placeholder. i typed the term anyway, lowercase, into the search bar. human biases, exactly that. the suggestions came back arranged like a cafeteria — list of human biases, human biases meaning, common human biases, ux cognitive biases — each one a tray, each one promising a clean lunch.

human biases: human biases are the small, automatic shortcuts the brain runs when it would rather not think a whole thought from scratch. there are many. there is no agreed-on number. on a quiet morning a person can recognize roughly nine in themselves; on a louder morning, more like forty-three.

FORTY. THREE. SHORTCUTS. ONE. BRAIN.

the cleaner version, the one a calmer writer would offer, is that the pillar piece on a brain that flatters itself covers the wider geography. this post is the inventory. a count. a quiet, slightly damp count, performed at the desk, while the deck remains two slides and a placeholder.

human biases, an overview from a man who has them

the overview is short. human biases are the patterns the brain prefers because the brain prefers patterns. they are not malice. they are not stupidity, although they look exactly like stupidity from the outside, which is part of the trick. they are the brain choosing the smaller answer because the smaller answer arrives faster.

i’m told, by a textbook with a cracked spine i cannot now find, that there are dozens of named human biases. a man on a podcast i played at speed put the number closer to two hundred. somewhere between dozens and two hundred is the territory of “a lot.” i live inside it.

the kinds people talk about loudest are the ones with names. the clinical version of how the brain agrees with itself has a name. anchoring bias, hindsight bias, sunk-cost fallacy — names. once a thing has a name, you can spot it at parties. you spot it in other people without ever spotting it in yourself. that is a bias on top of a bias. that is, possibly, why i don’t go to parties.

the biases i have personally tested, with results

i’ll list them, because lists are the only honest accounting i’m capable of before lunch. these are human biases i have, on the public record of my own life, demonstrated to my own detriment.

1. sunk cost. the third yoga mat lives under the couch. it has lived there since 2023. it has been used, at full strength, once, possibly one and a half times. i will not throw it out. throwing it out would, in my brain, retroactively make the purchase a mistake. keeping it makes the mistake an investment. one mat. one mistake. one bias, identified.
2. optimism, applied to appliances. i am on the seventh microwave. i call this number out loud sometimes, to no one. each new microwave was, at purchase, going to be the last microwave. each new microwave is, statistically, evidence that there will be an eighth. i continue to expect a different outcome from the same procedure. that is not a bias, technically. that is a definition.
3. hindsight, retroactive. i remember, with some clarity, predicting the outcome of a budget decision i did not predict. i remember winning an argument the room remembers me losing. the brain rewrites the tape after the fact, and the brain is the only one who has the tape. there is no one to appeal to. the brain is the judge, the witness, and the cleaning crew.
4. availability, dietary. on what counts as breakfast i would like to enter, for the record, that cereal is soup with rules. i hold this position because it was the first defensible argument my brain could reach for. that is the bias — i grabbed the easiest example, and now i defend it like a homeowner. i have eaten cereal for dinner. it was also soup. neither version flinched.

the biases i did not know i had until thursday

the biases above are the ones i can name in mixed company without dropping the glass. there is a second category, larger, hazier, populated by human biases i only recognized because someone, recently, pointed at them.

i was, last week, in a meeting i had no business being in, and a person whose job title contained the word “ops” used the phrase “the planning fallacy.” she used it the way some people say “the weather.” i wrote it down. i looked it up later, briefly — two paragraphs, one tab, one closed tab. the planning fallacy is the one where you estimate three hours and it takes nine. i estimated this post at thirty minutes. it is, as of this sentence, ninety minutes in. one bias, identified, mid-experiment.

there is also, apparently, the curse of knowledge — once you know something, you cannot remember the version of yourself that did not. i live there. and the spotlight effect, the bias that makes you think the room is watching when the room is checking its phone. the room, i can confirm from the desk, is checking its phone.

dad used to say something about it, when pressed

my dad, who is not in this scene and is not, technically, a man who used the phrase “human biases”, used to say a sentence i have, in fairness, partly invented in retrospect. “the head goes where it wants to go,” he said, allegedly, while doing something with a hose. “all you do is steer it back.”

that’s the whole text. i have polished the wording a little. the steering, i think, is the part that holds. the brain has its preferred routes. naming the routes does not pave new ones. you just learn, slowly, where the brain keeps drifting, and you nudge the wheel before the lane changes on its own. dad never named a single bias. dad correctly identified all of them, generically, in one line about a hose.

why human is the operative word in human biases

the part of the term that does the heavy lifting is the word human. we don’t call them biases. we call them human biases, which sneaks in the alibi. machines have their own — different shape, similar problem — but the human ones come pre-installed. there is a film called a thriller about a pill that fixes the brain in which the protagonist takes a tablet and stops being subject to most of these. on this desk, on this morning, there is no pill. there is, on the second shelf, a snack bar i bought in march.

the practical version of the term — how a person at a desk can be slightly less wrong by lunch — argues that the only honest move is to spot one today, name it, and let the others wait. the philosophical sibling — the take where the brain is grading its own homework — argues that you cannot use the brain to fix the brain without complications. both, together, are the morning.

verdict, the biases are the human

so the count, this morning, lands somewhere in the high teens. i didn’t reach forty-three. forty-three was the textbook count for a person who reads the textbook. i read two paragraphs of one and skimmed a podcast at speed.

what i can offer is this. human biases are not a flaw of the brain. they are the brain. removing them is not the goal because the brain, without them, would be a different brain, and the different brain is hypothetical, and the current brain has a deck to finish. the goal, generously stated, is to notice one today, and forgive yourself, mildly, for the other forty-two.

carla is back. the vendor demo went over. she has the small face she makes when something on the third floor was, in her phrase, “decided in advance.” she did not look at my screen.

the deck is still two slides and a placeholder. the third yoga mat is still under the couch. the seventh microwave is on its first month. somewhere on tab nineteen there is a list the planning fallacy did not let me reach. i’ll close the tabs after this paragraph. i’ll mean it.

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