Cognitive Bias

Okay, the title is clickbait, and I am ashamed of that. So, I’ll give you the bottom line up front: the Dunning-Kruger effect is (in my experience) spot-on, and even though it’s a bit of a pop psychology trope these days, I’ve encountered this effect countless times. There’s a fascinating interplay between Dunning-Kruger and imposter syndrome where these two psychological phenomena can work together in surprisingly complex ways.

The most challenging relationships I’ve experienced, both personal and professional, have involved highly neurotic individuals. By neuroticism, I mean a tendency toward emotional instability—characterized by inconsistency, excessive anxiety, disproportionate reactions to minor issues, and sometimes aggressive responses to everyday stressors. Understanding Neuroticism # Neuroticism exists on a spectrum. A moderate level of concern about potential problems can be productive—it helps us prepare and plan. But when these feelings become overwhelming or trigger reactions that damage relationships, they cross into problematic territory.

Survivorship bias often gets discussed as a cautionary tale. For example, someone might point out a person’s or company’s success, and another will retort with, “But that’s just survivorship bias!” What’s rarely discussed is how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. If you know that most success stories (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) are primarily the result of luck rather than skill, how can you use this information to your advantage?

In Daniel Kahneman’s influential book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he presents a compelling model of how our minds work: we have two distinct systems for thinking. System 1 operates automatically, quickly, with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to effortful mental activities, including complex computations and deliberate choice-making.

Software engineers tend to be smart people. Writing software is hard, and it’s entirely a discipline of exercising your brain cells to write the correct commands to make the computer do what you want it to do. Add in the layers of complexity that come with dealing with humans who want software to do something without necessarily knowing or understanding precisely what they want, and what you end up with is a fairly complicated practice.

Lies are easy. It’s easy to pretend your problems are someone else’s fault. It’s easy to pretend when things don’t go your way, that it’s the other party’s fault. We tell ourselves many lies to get through the day. Being honest is very challenging, and it’s especially hard to be honest with ourselves.

Life is a series of random walks. Even if you walk the same path every day (in the literal sense), your individual steps on every walk you take are essentially random, and for the most part you aren’t even conscious of them because this is handled by muscle memory. When I say the steps are random, what I mean is that if you could precisely measure every step you take—where your foot lands, how much force you apply with your individual muscles—the data would reveal a pattern from a statistical perspective, but each individual step would follow a normal random distribution. In fact, research on human gait variability confirms this, with studies showing that step-to-step fluctuations follow statistical patterns characteristic of complex systems.

I remember when my first serious girlfriend broke up with me decades ago. Her chief complaint revolved around some recent incident, the details of which have faded from memory, but our conversation remains vivid. I pleaded with her, explaining how she was clouded by recency bias—focusing on the recent negative experience while overlooking all our positive history together.

The Invisible Influence # One important (and mostly non-mainstream) concept is the idea of manufactured consent. The idea was originally described in a book authored by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the 1980s. For a quick summary, check out this video on YouTube which provides a great overview (use yt-dlp to completely avoid the ads).