Cognitive Biases
Over past few years, cognitive biases have been of passive interest/ fascination for me. Passive because I haven’t actually gone deliberately out of the way to study more about the topic. But I just notice and remember when I read about one. And then I try to look for and try to avoid that bias in my behavior. It probably started when I read the book “Thinking Fast and Slow”.* And then I ended up reading some other books in that space.
Why this topic now? Recently I started listening to Predictably Irrational by Ariely. I have read the book in the past. But revisiting helps. I have documented some of the biases in the past. Although by definition I may not be aware of my own cognitive biases, but I think the bias I suffer most from would be the imposter syndrome. Anyway, today I had breakfast and did not have anything else till almost 6pm. I was busy and with some people and as it got late and late, I started becoming anxious and impatient. The book (Thinking Fast and Slow) mentions how judges pass some biased judgements as it gets near lunchtime (or how parole officers’ decisions differ before and after their lunches, etc.) System 2 needs effort and at times people can be predictably irrational.
One of Ariely’s observations that struck me equally was from the documentary on Theranos. Ok, in the first place if you haven’t read the book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, then you MUST. Audible narration is very good. Anyway, back to Ariely’s experiment which he mentions in the HBO documentary. He says, well, why don’t you watch the documentary? I didn’t have a lunch, remember? He mentions a few things but which of his insights did you enjoy the most?
In my last company, in one year end appraisal discussion (around 2018 I think), my- somewhat new; only a month or so- manager asked me what my hobbies were. (A side note- this is not Pam Beesly story by the way- “Last year, my performance review started with Michael asking me what my hopes and dreams were, and it ended with him telling me he could bench-press 190 lbs. So I don’t really know what to expect.”) I told my manager, I liked to read. He was a little dismissive. He was an IITian of Nassim Taleb admirer type and some people of that type think the others are of Sidney Sheldon type (not that there is anything wrong with that. But again a bias- highly likely because of a large number of false positives). When he asked and I told him about my then recent read- Predictably Irrational- he asked me for examples in workplace. I gave some roundabout examples. But he insisted on more concrete ones and when I said SPOT awards highlight the irrationality, the meeting got over in maybe next minute or so.
*A really strange thing I noticed when I wrote the line- I don’t remember exactly who recommended that book to me. Generally for most of the books I do; unless I came across the recommendation on some forum. These days I get the book recommendations primarily from some net forums. And very occasionally from some friends. Friends who could recommend some books- they were always only a few; but they are now even fewer and distant. I guess this is a part of life. But it somehow saddens me. And the current company I keep does not seem quite book readers type. And forum recommendations may be a little off sometimes. In fact, the best hit ratio- recently- of someone recommending a book that- upon reading- I find good was from BillG’s blog. The guy is a crazy reader. In the Netflix documentary about him Melinda Gates says something like- not only he reads a lot but he is able to process everything he reads. Gotta kinda envy that.