It’s cognitive bias week, because thinking well is hard

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #149: drawing the DNC and how to small talk
By Harris Sockel & Buster Benson

This week, we’re trying something different: We’re going deep on a single topic and examining it from multiple angles. That topic is bias, specifically cognitive biases, or systematic errors in judgment that our brains use to help us make decisions.

There are four qualities of the universe that limit your intelligence and the intelligence of every other person, collective, organism, machine, alien, or imaginable god. Together, these four overarching “conundrums” lead to every error in judgment you’ve ever made…

• Conundrum #1: 🙈 There’s too much information. Our senses can’t possibly absorb it all.
• Conundrum #2: 🔮 There’s not enough meaning in the world, so we invent stories and patterns.
• Conundrum #3: ⌛ We have limited time and resources, aka we’re all going to die.
• Conundrum #4: 💾 We can’t remember everything, so we have to pick and choose what sticks with us.

Humans are inherently limited! Biases help us work around these limitations. Psychology professors Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the term “cognitive bias” in the ’70s. Since then, researchers have uncovered more than 180 biases. A few of the most prevalent include action bias (we prefer doing something to doing nothing, even when doing nothing might be more beneficial to us); bikeshedding (fixating on trivial things while ignoring more important problems); and the gambler’s fallacy (our belief that an event’s probability changes based on past outcomes, even if it’s all random).

Cognitive biases affect every decision you make, from choosing what to eat for lunch to picking a career path to figuring out who to vote for. Every day this week, we’ll dive into one of the ^above conundrums and its resulting biases to explore how we can all be a bit more self-aware about our brain’s shortcuts.

One last note: A side effect of learning about bias is thinking you’re immune to bias! But cognitive biases are core to being human. Trying to escape bias is futile. The best thing to do is be open to the fact that you are biased and actively repair the damage done. In the words of Lakshmi Mani, a product designer who examined confirmation bias on Medium a few years back, “approach life with curiosity not conviction.”

Elsewhere on Medium…

• Visual journalist Liza Donnelly shares a series of cartoons from last week’s Democratic National Convention. Of Tim Walz, she observes — as only a cartoonist can — that he has an odd way of smiling via frowning. “There’s a lot going on in that face.”
• Valve is one of the highest-earning video game companies (around $6.5 billion in annual revenue, up there with Electronic Arts). They’re the creators of Half-Life and Counter-Strike, plus Steam — the dominant platform developers use to distribute their own games. I’m not a gamer, but I was engrossed by this retro from Monica Harrington, the company’s former marketing lead. One fascinating detail: After spending a year and over $1 million building it, they scrapped the entire V1 of their first game because testers were meh about it; they regrouped and built something better, which took another year, and it went on to be a bestseller.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on strategic small talk

Ask “small questions” (“What is your cat’s name?”) and — if, like me, you tend to forget minutiae about other people’s lives — write down the answers so you can bring them up again later with people you care about. Seems slightly shady but useful, especially if you manage a large team and have a lot of small-talk-y conversations daily. Over time, mentioning these small details about a person will compound and lead to deeper relationships.

And the winner of Friday’s Zoom In quiz is…

Aman Kumar for correctly spotting the zoomed-in image from this story about the ’68 DNC riots. We’re pausing Zoom In for this week. BUT we have a new quiz coming up on Friday — and you’ll need to read each of this week’s issues to participate. That’s all we’ll say for now!

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com