Bias.

 


Alright, as promised here's more on cognitive bias. This is the list off of Wiki regarding some known cognitive biases. Reading down the list is nearly comical. If you go through it and don't admit you commit 95% of these then you must be lying. Here's a couple:

Curse of knowledge – when knowledge of a topic diminishes one's ability to think about it from a less-informed perspective.

Anchoring or focalism – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Recency bias – a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience attributed to recent stimuli or observations – the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.

Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. Colloquially referred to as "Hindsight is 20/20".

Self-serving bias – the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information or memories in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.


Good stuff. I'll try talking about bounded rationality and other applications of these, but for now I just wanted to lay out some examples to give you an idea of how stupid you are.