The other built-in compressors
The frame track introduced built-in compressors for perception (vision, hearing, the five senses). There's a parallel set for cognition. Your brain has hard-wired shortcuts that work most of the time but produce systematic errors in specific situations. They aren't bugs — they're features that traded full accuracy for speed and survival. They were sufficient for ancestral environments. They sometimes mislead you in modern ones.
You can't turn them off. You can learn to recognize when they're firing.
Five worth knowing
- Confirmation bias. You weight evidence that supports your existing view more heavily than evidence that challenges it. Every social media feed is now optimized to amplify this — your feed shows you what you'll engage with, which means what you already partly agree with.
- Availability heuristic. You judge how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind. Plane crashes feel common because every one is on the news; car crashes feel rare because they aren't. The actual ratio is the opposite.
- Anchoring. The first number you hear pulls subsequent estimates toward it. If a salesperson opens with $1,000, your offer of $700 feels like progress; if they opened with $500, $700 would feel like overpay. Same dollar, different psychology.
- Dunning-Kruger. Beginners in a field overestimate their ability because they don't yet know what they don't know. Experts often underestimate theirs because they vividly see how much they don't know. The pattern produces overconfident novices and humble masters.
- Hindsight bias. Once something happens, your brain rewrites your prior expectations to feel like "I knew it all along." This makes learning from mistakes harder and makes pundits sound smarter than they actually are.
Daniel Kahneman's two systems
Kahneman's lifetime work, summarized in his Thinking, Fast and Slow, frames cognition as two systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive. It runs all the time. It's where the biases live. System 2 is slow, deliberate, logical. It's expensive to run; you only invoke it when you have to. Most decisions, even important ones, are System 1 with System 2 doing post-hoc rationalization.
The skill isn't to override System 1 always — that's exhausting and not even possible. The skill is to notice when stakes are high enough that System 2 should take over, and to recognize the specific conditions where System 1 is least reliable. Big purchases. New domains. Unfamiliar people. Anything you'd normally rush through that has long-term consequences. Slow down for those.
The wider point
You're not a perfect rational agent, and pretending you are is the deepest cognitive trap of all. You're a biological organism with shortcuts that mostly work and sometimes fail predictably. Knowing the predictable failure modes is the skill. Carry the list above into everyday life. Notice them in others; notice them in yourself. The noticing is the move.