
My Cognitive Bias – A cognitive bias explained every time you open a new tab - wgx
https://mycognitivebias.com/
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voidhorse
First off, it's a neat idea and it extrapolates well to other domains. I'd
love to have "random x definition" when I open a new tab--would ensure I at
least get some learning done while procrastinating on the web.

On a less positive note, and tangentially related:

I'm kind of sick of the whole "bias" obsession. It's everyone's go-to
counterargument these days, and it's a shallow, poorly developed one. It's
like everyone's lost critical reasoning skills, which require delicate
attention to the particular strategies and propositions deployed in a given
argument, and found these set of stock biases to use instead. In fact it's
_impossible_ to purge an argument or line of thinking of _all_ so-called
biases (though these don't actually exist in arguments, they are deduced from
arguments)--if it were, it wouldn't be an argument or thought.

The goal of catching our own mistakes is an admirable one, and I'm not
advocating people stop doing that--I just think it too frequently bleeds into
trying to find so-called biases in _arguments_ (whether written or verbal). In
fact, this is more or less a fool's errand. What people are _actually_ trying
to point out in arguments are _logical fallacies_ which are traits of the
argument. _Biases_ contrarily occur at the individual level and are
_operational_ flaws, they only occur _during_ the thought process, and it's
only meaningful to talk about them in these terms (that is, as they manifest
in the ongoing practices of a person)--they are not properties of a line of
thought's encoding (the written or spoken argument). Fallacies or viewpoints
expressed in an argument may _hint_ at the biases of the author, but it's a
non-sequitur to start talking about them (when critiquing an argument), as the
only way one could actually confirm this is by observing the author at work in
daily life. To say, such an such an author is biased, is useless. It doesn't
contribute meaningfully to a critique of the argument, and it would need to be
verified through observation of the author.

 _Demonstrating_ to someone that they have developed/fall prey to particular
bias frequently and working to rectify that _one-on-one_ is a totally
different story, or trying to catch biases operating in yourself is a totally
different story.

Edit: I suppose you could say I'm biased against biases. A joke that
illustrates my point.

~~~
shadowsun7
I think one of the most interesting things that have come from my study of the
decision making literature is that there is a _second_ field that Kahneman
respects, that stands opposed to his heuristics and biases (H&B) tradition.
The field is called Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), and it's mostly built
around the study of intuition and expertise.

The argument that the H&B camp makes is that heuristics and biases get in the
way of proper judgments and decisions because they are shortcuts that our
brain makes to conserve resources. The argument that NDM makes is that
heuristics are _how our brain works_ , and we should spend more time utilising
how it naturally works to make better decisions, instead of fighting it and
trying to build intuitions for probability (which are unnatural, and not what
our brains are built for).

The disagreement led both of Kahneman (H&B) and Klein (NDM) to write a joint
paper:
[https://www.fs.fed.us/rmrs/sites/default/files/Kahneman2009_...](https://www.fs.fed.us/rmrs/sites/default/files/Kahneman2009_ConditionsforIntuitiveExpertise_AFailureToDisagree.pdf)
the key takeaway of which is that the H&B approach is best suited for domains
where expert performance is bad, and the NDM approach is better suited for
domains where expert performance is reliable. The paper describes the
conditions of the two domains.

I've written a longer post summarising the findings from NDM at
[https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-
practice...](https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice/),
which exists as part of a longer series on putting mental models to practice.
(Earlier parts cover the foundation of the judgment & decision making field,
which is mostly built around the H&B tradition at the moment).

~~~
sah2ed
You did a solid job outlining the 2 oppposing sides between heuristics and
biases (H&B) and Recognition-primed decision making (RPD) in the blog article
you authored and linked to.

I’d like to invert your key takeaway by looking at it a bit differently by
framing it in terms of the environment being observed rather than in terms of
the expert’s performance.

I’m reminded of this Murray Gell-Mann quote: _“Imagine how hard physics would
be if electrons could think "_ which I came across while reading an Economics
piece. The writer used the quote to illustrate how much harder Economics as a
field is, relative to a field like Physics. I agree with that characterization
because, in general, electrons and by extension inanimate objects are not
susceptible to behavior change from external stimuli, but humans are. Which is
why expertise can be considered reliable when the environment consists of
inanimate entities (e.g. astronomers, accountants) or animate but motiveless
entities (e.g. livestock judges, grain inspectors).

How reliable an expert performs in an environment largely depends on the level
of autonomy enjoyed by the entities that constitute the environment under
observation. An expert’s ability to reliably understand an environment
correlates inversely with the number of entities that enjoy autonomy in that
environment, because it is infeasible to model a real-world environment in
your head. What experts do is to mentally model a tiny slice of reality from
which to draw inferences from.

Humans are entities that can think and act independently before, during and
after an expert has been asked to intervene, which is why Doctors, Nurses and
Auditors appear in both columns of reliable and unreliable performance for
experts.

(PS: I encountered 2 occurrences of the typo: “Marlie Chunger“)

EDIT: reworded my comment significantly to make my point more clear.

~~~
shadowsun7
I’m assuming that you didn’t read the section of the essay where I summarise
Shanteau, Kahneman and Klein’s findings? Complexity of systems is one aspect,
certainly, but valid and regular causal inferences are by far the dominating
factor. Doctors, nurses, and auditors appear on both sides because they belong
to fractionated fields of expertise. I have included a definition of
‘fractionated’ (their terminology, not mine) in the essay.

(Also, Marlie Chunger is a fictitious character invented to illustrate some of
the ideas in the series.)

~~~
sah2ed
> _I’m assuming that you didn’t read the section of the essay where I
> summarise Shanteau, Kahneman and Klein’s findings?_

I did read your summary in the section titled _A Personal Take_ , unless there
is another summary? Link?

(I’m wondering if your blogging tool allows a way to jump directly to sub-
sections using anchor-links. This would be a time-saver for long-form essays.)

~~~
shadowsun7
Ahh, my apologies then. Yes, that’s the summary. You’re not the first person
to point this out to me, but it turned out that the other reader stopped at ‘A
Personal Take’ — which was what I thought happened here!

(I was going to look at the essay again and ask myself if I made a mistake,
since everyone seems to stop at that heading. It also meant my structure was
badly chosen. And then I saw your reply!)

Then, to address your idea more directly: I can see where you are coming from,
but I think Klein and Kahneman’s definition of ‘has reliable causal cues’ +
‘provides opportunities to learn those cues’ are better filters. Klein studies
some incredibly high performing individuals — experts who are able to perform
well even in very complex environments. So it’s not always true that
complexity of environment determines existence of expertise.

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jedberg
I see a lot of plugins to customize the new tab page, but at least the way I
use the browser, I usually never spend more than a second on that page.

Do people actually look at what's on the new tab page? I literally hit Ctl-T
and then start typing a URL or hit a bookmark in the bookmark bar. I don't
even know what's on the blank tab.

~~~
mycognitivebias
My assumption is that people will use this one for a bit and then install
something else. There are just about 200 of them so it shouldn't be long until
one sees all of them. However, if one learns about 2 or 3 biases they were not
aware of, I'll be happy. The primary goal behind this was to work with my wife
on it and we had a great time. The reaction we had from everyone was just
amazing and we'll look into building more fun things like this.

~~~
jedberg
I was in no way denegrating your work. Apologies if sounded that way.

I was just trying to see how many people actually look at that page.

~~~
mycognitivebias
No worries. I didn't think you were denigrating our work. If it helps at all,
we've had 141k page views since Monday. Granted, that's just how many tabs all
the users opened so I can't really tell how many people actually read the
definitions. I'll have to see if there's a way track the link clicks on the
Source links and measure that.

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snek
Seems like the authors of this extension have a bias towards chrome.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah. But it does have ~60% share.[0]

    
    
        Chrome   61.05%
        Safari   12.99%
        IE       10.92%
        Firefox  7.02%
        Other    8.03%
    

0) [https://malcolm.cloudflare.com/](https://malcolm.cloudflare.com/)

~~~
PudgePacket
Chrome and Firefox have the same extension format, it's probably only 10
minutes to get it on Firefox too!

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-
ons/Web...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension)

~~~
prashnts
Not only that, but Firefox has amazing tooling such as `web-ext` cli, where
you can just execute `web-ext sign` and it'll generate the `.xpi` format, run
it through automated test, and give you signed versions you can distribute
from wherever you want. They even have a polyfill to make the Promise based
API that firefox uses compatible to Callback style APIS in Chrome.

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polymerase
Author uses I/we but I couldn't find a name anywhere on the page.

~~~
mycognitivebias
Hey, That's intentional. My wife and I worked on this together over a couple
of weekends hence the use of I/we. We built this so that we can work on a
little project together and not for recognition. We're pretty private and we'd
be quite happy if no one knew our names but I'm sure that with a few google
searches, you'd be able to find out who we are. Since we don't collect any
data apart from page views/loads, we think that's fair but I'd love to hear
your thoughts if you disagree. Thanks

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city41
Is it possible to see a listing of all the biases somewhere?

Ah found it, once you install the extension it has this link at the bottom:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

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b3n
Is this the list used? The article claims that his "wife diligently did all
the research and compiled the list of cognitive biases".

~~~
mycognitivebias
Hey, Yes, that's the list we used and most definitions are from wikipedia.
Some wikipedia entrances weren't too clear so she looked for other reputable
sources instead. Granted, this isn't ground breaking research, but rather
curation. I'd say her effort still counts. Also, we are very open about not
being experts, but just very interested in the subject. I think it would be
unfair if we'd start to push uninformed opinions. I'd love to hear your
thoughts if you disagree.

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kgdinesh
If one's aware of all the cognitive biases, does it really make his/her life
better?

~~~
icebraining
You can't expect a good answer: anyone who has invested their time into
learning them all is surely biased :D

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jamesrom
A little while ago, I set up a Repetitions (repetitionsapp.com) deck with a
list of cognitive biases pulled from Wikipedia.

It's not foolproof, but being aware of cognitive bias means you can do more to
minimize bias in your every day life.

~~~
WalterGR
> repetitionsapp.com

Anki seems to be the go-to spaced repetition program here. Have you tried it?
What attracted you to repetitionsapp?

(I don’t use either, but I’m looking for a good one...)

~~~
skinnymuch
I’m interested in hearing about this too.

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mirimir
It'd be cool if the extension could pick a bias, based on a URL being browsed,
and then display as a pop-up or whatever.

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jgimenez
Quick suggestion: maybe you could add one example in your website or even a
screenshot, to show what it looks like

~~~
mycognitivebias
Thanks. That's a good point. I'll have to add something

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gcb0
cognitive bias #6385: install random browser extensions* from sites, instead
of expecting the site to actually show the content

* or browser tool bar. ha! you're all those suckers from the 90s, today.

