Cognitive bias cheat sheet, simplified

Thinking is hard because of 4 universal conundrums.

Buster Benson
Why Are We Yelling?
5 min readJan 8, 2017

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By John Manoogian III. Get the poster: http://bit.ly/bias-poster

Four months ago I attempted to synthesize Wikipedia’s crazy list of cognitive biases, and after banging my head against the wall for weeks, came up with this Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet which John Manoogian III beautifully organized into the above poster. It’s a 12-minute read, and I didn’t actually expect anyone to read it, but four months later it’s been viewed 750,000 times and recommended over 5,000 times! Since then, I’ve started working on a book proposal (get updates and ongoing thoughts), and wanted to start by creating an actual cheat sheet that doesn’t take so long to read. Here it is…

The 4 conundrums of the universe that lead to all biases

There are 4 qualities of the universe that limit our own intelligence and the intelligence of every other person, collective, organism, machine, alien, or imaginable god. All 200ish of our known biases are attempts to work around these conundrums!

🙈 1st conundrum: there’s too much information

The 1st conundrum is that there’s too much information in the universe for any individual within the universe to process it all. We have our 5 senses (or up to a dozen depending on how you…

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Buster Benson
Why Are We Yelling?

Product at @Medium. Author of “Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement”. Also: busterbenson.com, new.750words.com, and threads.net/@bustrbensn