It’s often somewhat uncomfortable to come to terms with privilege, especially if there are ways that you’re underprivileged. So you might want to look away from something that makes you feel uncomfortable, like poverty in India, or the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, or the femicide of a young, white woman […]
Category: bias
Limits to the Hiring Process
When reviewing candidates for a job position that got an overwhelming amount of applications, I realized how many rad people there are in the world. It makes me a bit sad that there’s only one position for so many amazing individuals, and this process has also helped me realize there […]
Experts
There are experts who have spent years studying, researching, and devoting a majority of their lives to a certain subject. We often assume these are formally (ie. university) educated people, and a lot of the time, they are. Virologists, rocket scientists, theoretical physicists, brain surgeons – these are all experts […]
Trusting Yourself
No one wants you to trust yourself more than I do. But there’s a difference in trusting in your inherent capabilities, and trusting that you’re right. Trusting in your inherent capabilities means that you can trust yourself to figure things out. To navigate uncertainty and act despite fear. It means […]
Experimental Mindset
It definitely feels good to be certain, but if we’re always certain, there’s no room for growth. Certainty is a nice place to hide, as then you can celebrate being right about things, even if, by objective standards, you might be wrong. Where in your life might you take a […]
The Perfect Time
We always hear about the perfect time. We fear being too early, but also fear about being too late. Whether we’re talking about when to arrive at a social gathering, when to invest in something, when we should launch something new, or whether or not to jump on a new […]
Absolutism
While there might be exceptions, in general, the more something leans into absolutism, the more likely it’s going to be incorrect. Assumptions about broad categories of people will often be wrong, especially the larger the category is. Things that work for some people, especially if it doesn’t acknowledge entire systems […]
Peak-End Rule
There is a cognitive bias known as the Peak-End Rule, which states that we have a tendency to qualify past experiences or events by the most emotionally-charged moment and the end of the experience, rather than the overall average of the event. Meaning, if you have a terrible week, but […]
Pools of Chocolate Pudding
So often we can see the obvious solution for someone else’s problem. Next steps, new ways to think about the solution, all of this is so clear to us when we look outwards. Looking inward, however, often seems like we’re trying to glean some answer through a pool of chocolate […]
Confirming Ourselves
As a human, we all fall prey to confirmation bias. We want our suspicions, hunches, desires, and needs to be confirmed by forces outside of ourselves. Whether that’s someone blatantly lying on the internet, data filtered to our liking, or actual facts, it’s easy to find the answer that we […]