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- Exploring the magnet, hidden biases, and being wrong
Exploring the magnet, hidden biases, and being wrong
Logan
September 05, 2024
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Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.
What’s inside?
One tool to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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One tool to experiment with:
The Magnet
Have you ever learned something new or novel, and immediately found case after case of it being all around you?
“How could I not see this before, it’s everywhere?” It’s as if you were blind to the obvious, but that isn’t the case here.
When you learn something new, or focus on a specific car, color, idea, word, etc, your mind becomes a magnet. All of a sudden, you filter and walk through the world with this powerful magnet in your head, going around searching and sucking in all the bits of information to fit your new filter.
But this isn’t always a good thing.
This mind-magnet is a cognitive bias called frequency illusion. In other words, it’s a form of faulty thinking. This specific line of faulty thinking distorts how we determine the representativeness of the world, which leads us into miscalculation and misjudgment and mistake.
We often pair it with confirmation bias, which is the 1-2 punch known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
For example, focusing on red cars can skew your belief in the percentage of red cars to all other colors that take the road. You subconsciously look for these red cars, and you start to see more of them. This swings your belief about how many actually exist. You start noticing more of them — that’s frequency illusion at work; our mind-magnet working against us.
These misrepresentations damage our ability to discern when navigating the probabilistic world.
But for your money, they can create unbounded value.
Through inversion, we can flip the bias over. Instead of slapping our hand, or making a painstaking effort to avoid this error, how can we use our mind’s faulty wiring to our advantage?
What areas of life would it be helpful to experience this effect?
If you set a filter in your mind to save $10 a week, and you keep this filter active, you will start seeing ways to save $10 each week. It’s not magic, but it’s close.
The golden rule here is to keep your positive filter active. To keep the magnet pulling the right things. If you want to keep your filter on, arm yourself with a daily question, “How can I do X this week?”
Not only do you notice that which you focus on, but you get it, too.
make your mind a magnet for good money moves
The obstacles that trip us up are often direct heirs of our own hidden biases, or blind spots. Spend some time trying to get a better view of these; ask yourself questions to uncover them. Ask a trusted friend, or advisor, to help shine some light. But, be open and honest.
“We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.”
“We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know.”
Three questions on being wrong:
What might I be wrong about?
What if in 100 years we find out that doing [x,y,z] is actually terrible?
What paths do I unquestionably trek because others have merely trampled the brush before me? Have I questioned these paths before; are they right for me?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
That which we think,
We also draw in.
Our minds are magnets,
Subconscious filters for information.
Contact Me:
Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
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