These Mental Shortcuts Are Ruining Your Judgment
🔍 Key insights
Your brain fills in gaps — sometimes with fiction – Our memories and perceptions aren't as reliable as we think. Illusions, false memories, and assumptions often rewrite our experience of reality.
We argue like lawyers, not scientists – Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias make us defend what we already believe, filtering out contradictory information.
Awareness trumps perfection – Even experts fall for cognitive biases, but awareness can help us slow down, challenge assumptions, and improve decision-making.
📚 Go deeper
🎥 Related videos:
Veritasium, "The Science of Thinking" – A compelling breakdown of how our brains function more like storytellers than calculators
Big Think, "Michael Shermer: Why People Believe Weird Things" – A skeptical look at hyperactive agency detection and pattern-seeking in human thought
📖 Further reading:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – A foundational book on heuristics and cognitive biases, written by the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for it.
The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons – Explores perception and the limits of attention, including the famous “gorilla experiment.”
🎧 Podcast to listen to:
The Ezra Klein Show – “Daniel Kahneman on Why We’re Blind to Our Own Minds” – A thoughtful conversation that highlights how even the most rational among us are predictably irrational
💡 Think for Yourself
Can you think of a recent disagreement where your "defense lawyer" may have been at work instead of your inner scientist?
What’s one belief you hold strongly — why do you believe it, and how would someone who disagrees challenge you?
☁️ Thought Experiment
Imagine waking up tomorrow with every memory slightly tweaked: tiny distortions, new details inserted, old ones removed. How would you even know? If you can't trust your memory entirely, where does your sense of identity come from?
Cheers,
Kevin