"We are constantly making decisions with our limited time and cognitive resources and memory storage.
“We’re not robots, and the fact that you can seemingly Google your way to anything does not make us smarter.”
She was plagued by the idea that while we’re living in the information age, life seems to be making less sense.
"It certainly doesn’t seem to be feeling any better, even though the quality of life is overall actually improving.
“Our innate irrationalities, that have always existed, are being dialled up to 11 because of the culture that we’ve created.”
Cognitive bias is a mental magic trick that we developed in order for us to make sense of the world sufficiently to survive it, she says.
"The natural world was always too much for us to process, if we had to catalogue the precise colour and shape of every twig in order to understand it, that would take more than a lifetime.
“So, we came up with these cognitive biases, dozens upon dozens of them. And they help us make decisions without our even noticing.”
Every human has cognitive biases, but when they collide with digital information overload, bad things can happen
The finding also holds for prehistoric, ancient, classical, medieval, and postmodern irrationality.
Just wanted to say. Modernity changed exactly nothing. It’s always been incredibly important to figure out irrational mental biases and try to compensate for them. The only thing modernity changed is the ability to learn about them more easily.
