What cognitive biases feel like from the inside

I would like to encourage this!

Alternative representations for a larger audience could be

• cartoons explaining a single concept, like XKCD or Dilbert.
• graphical overviews, like the cognitive bias cheatsheet.

What else would be feasible?

Love the tables

Dear Chaosmage, thank you for this post. I agree that communicating in abstracts is very hard. There seems to almost always be an element of who-what is good-bad and right or wrong with the content of any communication and are the people involved in the communication good-bad, right/wrong as people. Yodkowsky’s statement that arguments are soldiers comes to mind.

I am 63. I spent a lot of my life trying to impose my views on people from a testosterone fueled classic male dominance ego. No one would be wrong to accuse me of arrogance and a belief in my intellectual superiority. But I am older now and I see how often I really was wrong. I wish I had learned collaborative communicating skills so much earlier. I have learned that accepting I may be as wrong as right in a discussion with someone about opinions and feelings is important. Giving someone a way out, realizing and actually accepting they have to have whatever time is needed to consider what I’m trying to communicate or engaging (if possible) in a manner that allows both sides legitimacy works best. And generally, I have found people resist facts until it is comfortable for them to accept them, and always, always people have honor and pride in the game. I learned a long time ago to try and see the other person’s side, and listen/read to learn and understand not just to reply.

We have more technology than ever, but our brains essentially work the same as they did 10,000 or years ago.

I think learning to communicate in a clear concise “concrete” manner is always a good thing to have in our human toolbox. In my experience, trying to “crack somones head open” and pour in a lot of information we want them to accept often fails. That’s irrational in my opinion. Getting people interested and enthused and guiding them to the subject and allowing them to learn at their pace works better in my life experiences. I easily accept that this is not always true, because people are in fact forced to learn and humans sometimes do change their views/behaviors when being forced too.

Lastly, I intentionally tried to make this post concrete and easy to see my points. I left out all the complex words that go with the thinking behavior genre.

Keep up the good work! Best, Mike

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” E. O. Wilson
https://harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente

What it feels like for me:

Some things have permanent consequences (STDs) so I will never risk them (always condom).

How I see others who feel the same:

They exaggerate tiny risks to certainties because it's easier than doing tradeoffs. They ignore the benefits.

Feels like for me:

The most attractive things are exclusive and competed for (expensive cars, hot women), so it's smarter and friendlier to stick to no-cost alternatives (video games, porn).

How I see others:

By not even trying to get to Harvard or the Olympics, they're not getting any real mastery of anything.

Feels like for me:

I learned basic facts about how the world works as a kid, made the smart choices, and think everyone else's choices were dumb choices.

How I see others:

They feel the exact same way about me, no matter which decisions they made!

Sorry, can't name any of the biases.

I'm not really sure this helps me, though. The intensity of "how it feels for me" feels too strong for any "that's just a bias" to break through. Sometimes I just can't make myself believe the two lines in the illusion are the same length. I've looked at them a hundred times and the one's always longer.

I think it should also be mentioned that, when you're right and the other person is wrong, that also feels, from the inside, like confirmation bias does. That's why confirmation bias is so powerful: from the inside, you can't tell the difference between it and actually being right.

Promoted to curated: I really like the concreteness in this post, and liked it enough that I OCR'd all the pictures and translated them into real tables, to make sure the text is findable in our search, and generally easier to read in different contexts. 

Tone issues aside, I'm not even sure that this comment is about this post. Seems to tangentially pick on a single example given and use it as a wedge to talk about something entirely different.

This is fantastic. My first reaction was to share this with my son. It is like a translation between languages and that is great.

Very good. One minor quibble: it's not immediately obvious which table (the one above or the one below) is referred to in the "The scientific term for this mismatch is:" comments. Maybe a space after the comment to show it goes with the table above?

I'm going to assume this is a false flag attack on conflict theory by an insane, terroristic mistake theorist.

There is a significant amount to like here, and certainly this ought to serve as a very good first line kind of check for the possibility your strongly entangled in some of these biases with certain decisions. 

But, I'm not sure (and maybe it's not intended) to address situations where it's harder to tell. 

Take confirmation bias, in the case where you're actually right it feels almost identical to what is written in the table. Which means the table cannot reliably be useful to help decide the question of: 

"Am I really correct here, or am I just cheating myself with different standards of evidence depending on whether or not it matches my intuition/preference"

I'm not sure what to do about that, outside of rigorously trying to falsify yourself, in an honest manner, by aggressively pitting the opposing set of ideas against your own. 

FWIW there are lots of graphical resources on cognitive biases here: https://www.yourbias.is/

I'm using pictures because I couldn't get either editor to accept a proper table.

$$\begin{array}{|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
\textrm{System}&& SA\textrm{ possible?} & \textrm{Penalty neutralised?} \\
\hline\hline \textrm{20BQ} && \textrm{Yes} & \textrm{No} \\
\hline \textrm{RR} && \textrm{Yes} & \textrm{No}\\
\hline \textrm{AU} && \textrm{Probably} & \textrm{Mostly}\\
\hline
\end{array}$$

I want to make 
1) A general compliment for the post. 
I think the tables are helpful for those who seek to recognize their biases. Bravo!
2) A comment about the 3% of the 3B1B video. 
Thinking about the audience is crucial for communication. I think the video has reached much more than the 3% of its target audience.
3) A meta-comment N1 on communication.
When communicating, it is useful to know why you are doing it (also for other activities). If one wants to make the broad population aware of cognitive biases, one should know why and consider the marginal added value of the educational activity.
4) A meta-comment N2 on communication. 
I believe communication is most efficient when one understands the motives of the target audience and through communication provides support for the achievement of those motives. 
E.g. Situation: my co-authors are angry with the referee who criticized our manuscript as too implicit. I might, step 1) focus on making the best effort to resubmit the paper, thus putting explicitly the motivation for action 
step 2) make them aware of the transparency bias, on the example of how the manuscript can be written more clearly, thus introducing action(rewriting) that is aligned with the motivation (resubmission). 
Note in the example above, the educational part comes as a side-effect. One might be explicit about overcoming the biases to solidify the educational effect.

To recap, we should have the interests of our audience in mind. Moreover, if we do not act in the interest of the audience we risk triggering their defensive mode and thus make our efforts futile if not harmful

4-bis) A meta-comment on meta-comment N2. 
One might say that scalability is important (e.g. for Raising the Sanity Waterline) and that knowing one's audience is not scalable.
In other words, it's too costly to "educate" one person at a time.
I think this is not always true, there are motivations that are common across the population. Distilling those motives might be extremely useful for communication. Understanding which biases an "average Joe" is facing in his primary activities might be the most efficient way to "educate" the population on implicit biases.
E.g. I imagine a hypothetical video titled "How to actually get rich instead of fooling yourself" might be an example.

P.S. This is my first comment on LW, so "hello world". It looks longish - if you think multiple comments is a better format, please let me know.

I guess for better memorization these tables can be provided as anki cards. One card would provide either side (how I feel/how I see others feeling that way) of one row of any table and would ask for other side or bias name.

I'm reading this for the first time today. It'd be great if more biases were covered this way. The "illusion of transparency" one is eerily close to what I've thought so many times. Relatedly, sometimes I do succeed at communicating, but people don't signal that they understand (or not in a way I recognize). Thus sometimes I only realize I've been understood after someone (politely) asks that I stop repeating myself, mirroring back to me what I had communicated. This is a little embarrassing, but also a relief - once I know I've been understood, I can finally let go.

Here's the thing though. Sometimes one side IS genuinely correct[/good], and the other side IS genuinely wrong[/evil].

Take the [] out, and this is one of the first things I was thinking upon reading this post. Interestingly, you don't need to bring conflict vs mistake theory into this at all.

I think this comment should be its own post/open thread comment (probably the latter) and then I'd find it reasonable (dn about others). The tolerance on this site for talking about your pet issue in the context of sth vaguely related is very low.