common cognitive errors — 1 thorough investigation

common cognitive errors are, more or less by definition, the small mental ones that most of us regular humans make every single day. a thorough investigation has now revealed i am making roughly fourteen of these particular biases as i type this very sentence out. the typing itself, on reflection, is possibly the fifteenth one in progress.

i am at the desk on a thursday at 9:48am, which is the lunch end of the morning and the part where carla has slipped upstairs for the q3 review and the floor below me has gone, briefly, sensible. the unidentified caller has rung twice already. i did not answer either time, which is, i’d like to log up front, almost certainly one of the errors on the list. the list is below. the list is also, in some sense, autobiography.

the working table that follows is built from four small misreads i can produce, on demand, from the last six weeks of my own life. each misread is a private cognitive error masquerading as a normal afternoon. each one cost me, on average, between twenty minutes and a small appliance. the table is, like most of my tables, generous to the host.

1. common cognitive errors, the working table

before getting to the four misreads, i’d like to put the working table out, the way the panel does at an actual investigation, which i have only seen in films. the table below is, by my own measure, the most useful artifact of this entire post. you can stop reading after the table and lose almost nothing. that is, on reflection, also a cognitive error, and i am introducing it on purpose, noted, in front of the panel.

here is what nobody on the smarter-podcast circuit will admit out loud — the daily version of working pillar on confirmation bias as a daily habit covers most of the territory below, but the territory keeps producing new frontages anyway. the table is the front yard. the pillar is the foundation. you can sit on either, but you can only build a post on one.

each row is a routine cognitive error, the kind a sensible person would catch and i, on the whole, do not. the table is, technically, evidence. i’d like that entered into the record now, while the q3 review is still in its first hour and the panel is still receiving submissions.

the broader thing nodding under all four rows is the same thing the working note on cognitive bias as a definition already maps. namely, that a misread is not, in the moment, a misread. it is a perfectly clean read of the wrong picture. that is what makes it common, and that is what makes it ours, mine more than most.

2. error one, the bar test misread

the first common cognitive error on the table is what i’ll call, generously, the bar test misread. it works like this. you go to the corner bar at a sensible hour, on a friday, after a week that has not been a personal triumph. you sit down. you order. by the second drink, you decide you can read the room. you can, in your own head, identify the regulars, the new faces, that one figure at the far end clearly not there for company, the table by the window where someone has been waiting twenty minutes for a date that is not coming.

you decide all of this in roughly four minutes and proceed to act on it. you pick a stool. you start a small conversation. you make a face, the wrong one, at a story you have, in fact, completely misunderstood. by the third drink, the room you read in four minutes has finished revising itself, and the version you are now sitting inside is a different room with the same furniture. that is a misread. it is not the bar’s fault. the bar has no opinion on you.

the misread is mine, and it is, by my own running count, the same misread i have been performing in that exact bar since the lease on the apartment was signed. i’d argue, and the unidentified caller has now rung a third time without leaving a message, that this kind of confident-and-wrong is, in clinical terms i won’t use, the closest neighbor of the famous overconfidence-without-skill problem the internet keeps writing posts about. the cousin of that problem lives, mostly, in our cluster note on the effect named after dunning. dunning is the name on the door. the misread is mine. the chair at the bar, in fairness, has my name on it the way the volvo has tom’s name on it. that is also data.

3. error two, the seventh microwave misread

the second common cognitive error is the seventh-microwave misread, which is the one i know best because i have, by personal account, performed it seven times. each time, the morning starts identically. there is a thing in a bowl that needs heat. there is, on the counter beside the bowl, a fork. i look at the fork. the fork looks ordinary. the bowl looks ordinary. the microwave, in a perfectly pleasant kitchen on an otherwise unremarkable weekday, looks like a small box that turns cold things into warm things.

the misread is the part where i decide, in the half second before i press the button, that this morning will be different. the fork will, this time, behave. the appliance will, this time, accept the fork as a guest. neither has ever happened. the misread persists, regardless. that is the structural feature of a common cognitive error. it is durable. it survives evidence. it survives, in my case, six previous receipts from a kitchen supply store.

this is, in some sense, the same instinct that powers the show i keep returning to, which is to say an idiot abroad, where a man is repeatedly placed in territory that contradicts his expectations and proceeds, on each new continent, to expect the territory to behave differently than the last. the territory, like the fork, declines. the man, like the microwave operator at this address, does not update the model. that is, by any honest reading, a common cognitive error in slow motion across multiple time zones.

4. error three, dad’s quote misread

the third common cognitive error is the one i have inherited, and i’d like to enter it for the panel because the panel is mostly me, and the inheritance is, structurally, on me to acknowledge. my dad used to say, when i was small enough not to ask follow-up questions, that you can tell a man’s character by what he does on a tuesday. for thirty-some years i have been quoting that line back to myself on tuesdays as if it were a checklist.

here is the misread. i have been hearing the quote the way you hear a fortune cookie — as a portable, all-weather instruction. it is not. it was, on rereading, a much smaller observation. dad was, i think, talking about not lying on the tuesday after a long weekend. it was a comment about hangovers and honesty. i turned it into a code. i’d like to log that as my error, not his. dad was not building a system. i built one out of him, on my own initiative, on a desk thirty years later.

this happens, and the cleaner phrasing for it lives in our working note on what cognitive bias means at the kitchen counter. the short version is that when a quoted sentence comes from someone whose voice you carry, the brain does not check the size of the original sentence. it just plays it back at the volume the brain feels like. that volume is, on tuesdays at my desk, considerably louder than the moment dad was actually living when he said the line. the misread is mine, again, logged in serif.

5. error four, the gym sauna misread

the fourth common cognitive error is the gym sauna misread, and i’d like the panel to be patient with this one because it is, by far, the most expensive. i belong to a gym i go to almost exclusively for the sauna. i have a key tag. i have a profile in the system. i have, somewhere, a locker code i no longer remember. the misread is that, every month when the membership fee posts to the bank app i don’t open, i tell myself, briefly, that i could go work out. i could lift. i could use the machines.

i have not done that, by any honest reading, in two years. i go for the sauna. i sit in the sauna. i sweat in the sauna. i leave. that is the entire arc of my membership, and it is, when i look at it from any angle other than the moment of monthly billing, the only arc the membership has ever supported. the misread is in the moment of billing, where i pretend i am paying for the gym. i am paying for the bench in the sauna. the bench costs whatever the membership costs, divided by the number of times i sit on it, which is a number i could compute if i wanted to feel something specific in the chest.

this kind of error is exactly what one of my standing takes points at, and i’d like to invoke it literally rather than paraphrase. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i decline to compute the cost-per-sauna-session. the not-computing is, itself, the system. that is also a misread, and i’m fine with it. the sauna is warm. the bench is wooden. the math, to be specific, is private. the unidentified caller does not need to know.

6. verdict, the errors are common because i make them all

the verdict, after the working table and four entries and a q3 review that is now, by the clock on my screen, nineteen minutes past its supposed end, is that common cognitive errors are not called common because everybody makes the same ones. they are called common because each of us makes our own four or five, on rotation, on schedule, like a small private weather pattern.

my four are above. yours are different and possibly worse. that is the territory. the most thorough investigation a single person can run on themselves, from a desk, on a thursday lunch hour, is to write the four down without flinching. the writing is the entire intervention. there is no fifth step. the misreads do not stop. they do, however, get logged. logging is, by the count i keep running, the upper limit of self-knowledge available on a workday with limited minutes left in it.