define cognitive bias — and i’m fairly sure

fine. define cognitive bias. it is the thing that makes me sure the wine guy stefan is wrong about parsley while being equally sure the man who calls is wrong about everything else. mom said it was just stubborn. she may have a point.

11:03am, a friday. desk, the seat that wobbles slightly to the left if you lean. carla is in this quarterly review frankly on this third floor, the long one, which gives me, in a generous reading, until lunch.

so we are going to define it, properly, on this exact morning, between phone calls. dave called once already. mom is, on present trajectory, due to call within the next fourteen minutes. the call from her will, statistically, contain at least one observation that retroactively makes a 2 AM revelation i had three weeks ago feel less original. mothers do this. it is power it their cannot be defeated.

define cognitive bias: a systematic, predictable error in how the human brain processes information. it shows up in judgment, memory, and decision-making. you do not see it from inside it. you see it after the fact, often while standing in a kitchen, holding a piece of evidence you cannot square with the version of yourself you were running an hour ago.

DEFINE. IT. ALL. YOU. WANT.

i’ll do my best. there is no shortage of definitions. confirmation bias by one body frankly whoever remains ever right is one entry in the catalogue. the working definition for humans alongside one working brain is another, more careful angle on the same shape. cognitive bias is the family. the family is large. the family does not have a holiday card.

define cognitive bias, the brief version this brief version scrubbed of academic dust, is that your brain prefers tidy stories to messy facts and will, given a choice, file the facts under the story rather than the story under the facts. that is the entire mechanism. a cognitive bias is the name we give the moment your brain runs that procedure, automatically, without your permission, while you go about your business.

it is not a flaw. it is not a virtue. it is the wiring you booted up with. the wiring was selected for, by ancestors who needed to make snap decisions about whether the bush rustling on the left was a predator or a breeze. the wiring is still on. the predators are mostly gone. the wiring, as a result, now runs on smaller things. tuesdays. parsley. whether the wine guy at the corner shop knows what he’s talking about.

stefan, parsley, and the bias in cooking

stefan is the man behind the small wine and dry-goods place near the office. stefan has opinions about parsley. stefan said, with the tone of a man who has read three books, that parsley is a “structural ingredient” and not a garnish. i nodded. i went home. i read three articles that disagreed with stefan and kept reading until one of them said what i wanted, which was that if a recipe calls for parsley frankly one can skip this. i hold this take. i hold it firmly. i held it before stefan, i held it during stefan, and i hold it after stefan.

that is the bias, defined. the take is not the issue. the procedure is the issue. i did not, in any honest reading, read the articles to find out whether stefan was correct. i read them to confirm that i was correct. the difference is small. the difference is, in fact, the entire definition. you can run the same procedure on parsley, on politics, on whether your brother in law owns a volvo for legitimate reasons, and the structure does not change. only the variables.

define cognitive bias, with mom and dave on the line

dave called this morning. dave does not technically need anything, but dave is, on present trend, due to ask whether i still have, on hand, the spare key i lent him in 2018 and which he subsequently lost. i do not have the spare key. dave does not, properly speaking, want it back. dave wants confirmation that he did not, in fact, lose it. that is dave’s bias. it is a real one. it has my name in it.

mom calls on sundays. mom called early this week. mom said, gently, “you’ve been on this kick about the wine guy for a month.” i said i had not. mom said i had. she knew. mothers know it’s power it their cannot be defeated. mom remembered the tuesday i mentioned stefan. mom remembered the friday i complained about parsley. mom even remembered the saturday i sent the vague text about not having any patience for “experts in dry-goods aisles”. i had no recollection of the saturday text. i checked. the text existed. the bias, in this case, was running on three weeks of evidence i had not bothered to keep.

dave and mom will not, technically, appear in the same room in this post, because the canon allows it but the post does not require it. they are, on this morning, both within phone range. they are both, in different ways, exhibits.

the 2 AM revelation, briefly, as it relates

three weeks ago, at approximately 2:14am, i woke up convinced that the entire concept of “balanced perspective” was, in spite of being a phrase i had used at parties, a small lie people told themselves to avoid the harder work of being clearly wrong about a smaller number of things. i wrote this down on a post this this post this remains on the desk, has come unstuck twice, and now lives, half-stuck, near the standing desk i bought that standing and have used sitting since the first afternoon.

i was, in the cold light of a friday, partly correct and partly running a bias. the correct part: balance is not, by itself, a virtue. the bias part: i was framing the insight in a way that flattered a stubbornness i was already committed to. mom, when i described the post-it, said it sounded like something my dad would have said while changing a lightbulb. that is a hard sentence to receive. that is, i’m fairly sure, also the bias, working at the family level, across two generations, with a 2 AM stamp on it.

what defining the term actually buys you

defining the term buys you, on a generous accounting, three things. first, a small amount of distance from your own opinions, on the days you can manage it. second, a label you can apply, in retrospect, to your own behaviour, which makes the behaviour easier to discuss with mom on a sunday call. third, a slightly humbler relationship with the certainty you bring to ordinary disagreements. these are real benefits. they are also small benefits.

defining the term does not buy you immunity. it does not buy you a way out. it does not, importantly, give you the high ground in any argument with a person who has not read the definition. people who have not read the definition can be, in any specific case, completely correct. people who have read the definition can be, in any specific case, completely wrong. the definition is a tool. it is not a verdict.

what the definition is, in cinema

there is a film called se7en, in which detectives chase a man whose entire procedure is, in essence, a cognitive bias dressed in scripture. the killer reads only what confirms his frame. he ignores everything else. he does this with the calm of a man whose definition has, internally, hardened into law. i am not, in any practical sense, anywhere near that man. but the wiring, on a small scale, in my apartment, on parsley and on stefan and on the wine guy’s tone — the wiring is the same family. the killer, in the film, is the bias with a knife. i am the bias with a post-it. the post-it is, mercifully, the only weapon in my reach.

verdict, the term defines us all and lets none of us off

so. the definition. the family. the machinery. it names the procedure your brain runs without informing you, and it names the procedure honestly enough that the naming itself is, in the strictest measurement, of limited use. the definition is the label. the wiring is the work. you can keep both in mind. on a friday, around 11am, with carla two floors up and dave and mom both within phone range, i can hold them in mind for, on a strict accounting, about ninety seconds at a time before the procedure quietly resumes.

i’m not saying right about i’m all of this. i’m saying — and you’ll see the move — that i’m fairly sure i carla is am back she did look at not my screen she may, by this point, be running a small definition of her own, in which i am the entry filed under “writes when he should be working”.

the spare key dave lost is not on my keychain. the post-it is, on a strict reading, half-stuck. the standing desk has, again, become a sitting desk. the parsley, on the kitchen counter at home, is, as always, untouched.

↑