cognitive bias, 1 morning, 6 angles

a thorough investigation into cognitive bias would have, ideally, started with a quiet room, a clean notebook, and a sober afternoon. mine started instead with the productivity bro tweet, three open browser tabs, and a half-eaten slice of cold pizza. the results, predictably, vary by the hour.

a friday, 11:34, the desk where i am, technically, supposed to be reconciling a vendor list nobody has actually verified since february. the printer two rows over is whining at a frequency only i seem to register. somewhere in the building a sales kickoff is winding down without me, which gives me, on a generous read, the rest of the morning before anyone notices the vendor list is still untouched.

so the question on the table: what, in operational terms, is a cognitive bias. not the textbook version. the kitchen-counter version, the one that explains why i bought the third yoga mat in 2023 and have not stepped on it since.

cognitive bias: a cognitive bias is a quiet, repeating shortcut your brain takes when it processes information, and it produces a predictable error in judgment, memory, or decision. it is not a malfunction. it is the original wiring. there are dozens of named varieties. the most common is the one that makes you keep reading sentences that flatter your existing position, which is, suspiciously, why you are still here.

THE. BIAS. DRIVES. I. WALK.

cognitive bias, my working definition

the working definition i landed on, after forty minutes of looking that does not deserve the word research: a cognitive bias is the discount your brain applies to evidence based on whether the evidence agrees with what your brain already wanted to do. evidence in your favor: full price, premium, eye level. evidence against you: clearance, slightly damaged, behind a sign that says “as is”.

this is not a flaw. the discount is the design. the design predates you. the design was selected, by ancestors who needed to recognize a predator before they finished the thought, not by anyone who had to file a w-2 or argue with someone who owns a volvo. the cousin term most people confuse this with is its most famous member, confirmation bias, defined by someone who is always right. that one is a specific shortcut. the umbrella i am writing about includes that shortcut and many more.

tom does cognitive bias differently, with a volvo

tom, the tom from college with the wife and two kids and the small house with a porch he refinished himself, has cognitive biases too. tom would admit this, if pressed. tom is a reasonable man. that is, in part, the problem.

tom’s biases produced, over a decade, a volvo, a fixed-rate mortgage, and a pension he can describe at brunch in three sentences. mine produced the seventh microwave, a couch with a yoga mat under it that is, possibly, evolving, and an apartment lease that renews because i never opened the email asking if i wanted to move.

tom’s brain runs the same machinery as mine. the difference is which exits the wiring takes. tom’s takes the exit toward “settle, the receipt is in the envelope”. mine takes the exit toward “this looks great in the email, i’ll deal with it later”. the bias drives the volvo. i walk. that’s the whole post in one image.

mike at the bar has a working theory

i floated the volvo image past mike at the corner on wednesday after work. mike, three pints in, leaning his elbow on the wood, said, with the small confidence of a man who has not filed a tax return since 2019: “everybody’s brain takes the deal that flatters it. that’s it. that’s the whole thing. they just call it different names depending on who’s losing the argument.”

mike does not know the term. mike has never opened a textbook. mike has, however, been running an unbroken twenty-year study at the same bar, on the same stool, observing the same eight regulars. mike is, in the bar’s smaller economy, the closest thing to peer review.

mike’s theory, laid out around the third pint, breaks the catalogue into three buckets, which he labelled on a coaster, in pen: the deal that flatters you, the deal that scares you out of the room, and the deal that lets you stop thinking about the thing. that’s, give or take, every cognitive bias on the list. mike does not know he reinvented the catalogue at the corner over three pints. mike laughed for nine straight minutes when i told him he had outlined the literature. i timed it.

dad had a quote that almost fits

i thought, briefly, about what dad would have made of all this. dad did not theorize. dad fixed things. my dad used to say a man who explains why he was wrong, in long form, is the same man who is going to be wrong again next week. dad said this in 2001, holding a wrench, looking at a water heater. dad was not talking about cognitive bias. dad was talking about a brother-in-law who had blamed the gravy.

but the quote, on a generous read, fits. dad did not need the term. dad watched the brother-in-law’s hands while he talked, and decided, on hand-evidence alone, who in the room was about to be wrong about the gravy a second time. dad ran heuristics. dad would have called them knowing people. the literature would have charged dad for the syllables.

the chatgpt version that filtered me

i asked chatgpt, in a moment i’ll call weakness, to define the term in two sentences. chatgpt obliged with a paragraph that contained six adverbs i would not personally use and one passive construction so polite it sounded apologetic. the paragraph was correct. the paragraph was also useless to me, because it had been written by something that has never owned a yoga mat, and definitions written by entities with no apartment carry a flatness you can taste.

i then asked chatgpt to redo it “in the voice of a tired person at a kitchen counter”. chatgpt produced a paragraph that included the words “unleash” and “journey”, and i closed the tab in a small, private rage. the_algorithm, somewhere upstream, had decided that tired people at kitchen counters use the word unleash. the_algorithm has never been at a kitchen counter. the_algorithm thinks a kitchen counter is a content category.

this is, near as i can tell, a cognitive bias of a third sort: the bias of the machine that has read everything and felt nothing. the machine has all the entries. the machine has none of the kitchen.

verdict, the bias drives the volvo, i walk

the verdict: cognitive bias is not a thing you have. it is the way you do everything. tom has it. mike has it. dad had it. i have it twice over, because i have it, and i also have an opinion about it, and the opinion is itself a small, late-arriving bias dressed up as analysis.

the practical move is small. you cannot remove the wiring. you can, on a good morning, slow down by ten seconds before you act on it. ten seconds is not a transformation. ten seconds is a polite gesture toward the truth. for the umbrella term in plainer language there is the cognitive bias meaning, in a working person’s words, and a closely related case study in the confirmation bias meaning, with mike’s wednesday accusation in full. the broader practical question of what to do about all this lives at how to become a smarter person, with forty-seven open tabs.

there is a film called the 2013 spike jonze movie about an operating system, in which a man falls in love with software shaped to flatter him. the man is not stupid. the man is human. the man’s wiring takes the exit it has always taken. the man drives, in his own quiet way, a volvo of the heart. tom would understand. mike would not have watched the film. dad would have fixed the operating system on principle.

the printer has stopped whining. the kickoff has emptied out into the elevator. someone, probably carla, just slid past the desk without looking — the second drawer is still open, which means she saw the slice of cold pizza, which means a comment is coming on monday. mondays are objectively better than fridays is, conveniently, the position i have already filed.

the longer reading on the closely related question of why we keep believing what we already believed lives at how to become smarter, the comparative form, in tabs. that one shares a couch with this one. the couch, as established, has the third yoga mat under it.

↑