Cognitive bias (cheat sheet)

Learn: Cognitive Bias (cheat sheet), Life Range Probability, Tech Tip
Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

Greetings from Colombia, 

They say the quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your life. 

Which sounds nice… but it’s missing one crucial step in the middle: 

The quality of your thoughts → impacts the quality of your actions → impacts the quality of your life. 

This newsletter aims to improve your action quality.

Let's boogie.

🧠 Cognitive Bias (Cheat Sheet)

We use Waze to avoid traffic jams and find optimal routes for our cars.

Which is precisely what cognitive biases do for our brains.

By studying our biases, we can hopefully avoid some of these dreaded brain jams and make smarter decisions.

To start out, I found this Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet helpful since it groups 175 biases into four core problems:

• Information overload

• Lack of meaning

• Need to act fast

• What should we remember? 

Take the Dunning-Kruger Effect for example (falls under the "need to act fast" category) which is top of mind for me.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people with a low ability at a certain task tend to overestimate their ability at that task. (Opposite is true too, where high performers underestimate their skills.)

So the less we know, the more confident we are. The more we know, the less confident we are. 

Simply put, humans are horrible at evaluating our own competence levels. 

So what can we do about it? 

1 - Start by asking more questions. It turns out, the person who says “this might be a stupid question...” generally asks profound questions which accelerate learning. 

2 - Remember this chart if you're struggling. This image, by the way, is the ONLY thing getting me through my Spanish classes right now.

⏳ Expectancy vs Range

The 2022 average life expectancy in the US is 79 for women and 73 for men. 

But that’s life expectancy from birth. 

The range of our life expectancy gets much more interesting. 

The image above shows a simulation and the probability of our years left to live.

Aka, the ball can drop any day, nothing is guaranteed. 

Check out this article and plug in your own age and gender here.

🎙️ Tech Tip - Krisp AI

On a Zoom call last week at a coffee shop, I realized I had a bunch of fuzzy background chatter. 

Then I found Krisp AI, which automatically cancels out background noise and echoes. 

As the speaker, I don’t notice a difference, but my fellow Zoom homies say my voice now sounds as smooth as butter (imagine somewhere between Morgan Freeman and Jim Nantz).

I’ve been using the free version here.

Much Love,

Mitchell