"We are constantly making decisions with our limited time and cognitive resources and memory storage.
"We're not robots, and the fact that you can seemingly Google your way to anything does not make us smarter."
She was plagued by the idea that while we're living in the information age, life seems to be making less sense.
"It certainly doesn't seem to be feeling any better, even though the quality of life is overall actually improving.
"Our innate irrationalities, that have always existed, are being dialled up to 11 because of the culture that we've created."
Cognitive bias is a mental magic trick that we developed in order for us to make sense of the world sufficiently to survive it, she says.
"The natural world was always too much for us to process, if we had to catalogue the precise colour and shape of every twig in order to understand it, that would take more than a lifetime.
"So, we came up with these cognitive biases, dozens upon dozens of them. And they help us make decisions without our even noticing."
Every human has cognitive biases, but when they collide with digital information overload, bad things can happen
If you ever feel stupid, please think of this anecdote:
There's this roadwork going on around downtown, and one road is completely closed. I've counted: there's 12 very large, bright orange signs leading up to it that say "road closed - parking access only".
There's always a guy standing at the road corner waving a flag and pointing at the huge signs.
And every single time I walk past, there's at least one, often many drivers making the u-turn at the end of it.
I AM DISMAYED TO LEARN THAT FRED DURST IS AN ACTUAL DIRTBAG AND NOT SOME BERKELEY GRAD AFFECTING A PERSONA. SO MUCH FOR A SELF-CRITICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY CALLED "CHOCOLATE STARFISH AND THE SEMIOTICS OF MALE RAGE."
“How can you determine whether you are using a ramdisk at boot time¹? In Chapter 5 we mention using the distribution installation script to install the kernel versus doing the installation on your own. If you are using the distribution installation script, you are probably using a ramdisk. If you are installing it on your own, you are probably not.”