A Guide to Essential Thinking, the Second Part—Oops
A Guide to Essential Thinking, the Second Part—Oops: An Introduction to the Many, Many Ways in which Thinking can Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong, with Suggestions for Avoiding Some of the Common Problems and Errors, along with the Usual Irrelevant Pictures of Animals that I Enjoy Looking at and that I, and it Is Hoped, Others, Find Interesting A picture of a bird in the botanical garden in Bogotá, Colombia (not Columbia) MARLA PERKINS, PH.D.: ESSENTIAL THINKING, OOPS 1 Section I: Cognitive Biases A picture of a snail enjoying a succulent in the botanical garden in in Bogotá, Colombia MARLA PERKINS, PH.D.: ESSENTIAL THINKING, OOPS 2 Cognitive biases are problems that arise in thinking because of the way human brains work (and probably other brains—I’m not a speciesist, nor was Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that chickens could benefit from more refined thinking, but their problem is covered later). I’m avoiding the anthropocentric bias. It would be a reasonable expectation that people can’t avoid problems that their own brains cause, and to some extent, that’s accurate, but because people can do meta-thinking (thinking about thinking) and can think again, once aware of the biases, there are ways to work around the biases. As of the time of this writing, there are almost two hundred (!) cognitive biases that have been identified, and more are being described frequently. Not to worry: not all of them will be covered here. Brains don’t work so well for essential thinking, apparently, at least until the brains are given another chance, which has implications that it’s important to remember: essential thinking is a difficult, time- consuming process.
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