The title of this post is a little misleading, you cannot cheat your way into improving your ability to separate signal from noise. What you can do is increase the salience of what leads to false signal detection.
In Series 1 of this blog we looked at specific cognitive behaviours and functions. Specifically pattern recognition, cognitive biases, heuristics, hermeneutics, and mental models.
There are literally hundreds of these short cuts and assumptions that we are unconsciously using everyday. Bringing them into your conscious awareness is extremely valuable, I cannot overstate the benefit of this. As you learn more about these biases you will notice which ones you are more susceptible to, giving you relevant focus.
You will separate yourself from the masses as a better decision maker, someone that is ahead of the narrative, and who can spot opportunities that others are missing. This will help you discover alpha in social, relational, financial, and knowledge arenas.
How to increase conscious awareness
Many others have already done the work for you, there are a myriad of resources to choose from. I have PDFs of cognitive biases and heuristics available to study and refer to. It is not the most exciting topic so any resources that add imagery, colour, or humour will improve your outcomes.
For cognitive biases I regularly use yourbias.is it is becoming a daily habit to raise my conscious awareness of biases.
Applying conscious awareness to self
It is not enough to just only raise your awareness of biases and heuristics, you also need to apply the conscious awareness to your self. This means recognising the possibility of your own cognitive biases being part of your meaning-making and decision making.
Confirmation bias is a good example. Social media algorithms support confirmation bias by feeding you information that is already aligned with what you view, like, repost etc. A simple test for the presence of confirmation bias is to ask yourself, “Do I want this to be true?”. Just a note here I am not suggesting that you ask this question all the time! But when you know that there is doubt or uncertainty then this is a useful question to ask.
If the answer is “Yes” then it is worth looking for some information that is contrary to what you already believe, or wish to be true. This is a basic method to bring in alternate perspectives and new information.
Familiarity heuristic is a mental shortcut we use when under a high cognitive load. Put simply, what was true for past is still true now. The basis for this is the assumption that the underlying circumstances have not changed so we treat patterns of behaviour as still being appropriate to a new situation.
When we are busy, or dealing with complexity it is easy to shortcut the hard work or making sense by making assumptions. We are ignoring the very real issue that circumstances change, and things are not as they once were.
By learning about our own biases we can develop the habit of countering our own self-deception. Combined with meditative practice, we can make great strides in separating signal from noise.
In the next article we will look at reducing identity as a further autodidactic practice before moving on to the important work of collaboration.
Previous article in this series “Sensing Signal”
Next article in this series “Sine Identitatis”
