Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

The brain is an <em>integrator</em>. It takes in information from all over the body, and puts it together to decide how you should act. This messy integration acts as a bottleneck, forcing the brain to streamline as much as possible. Rarely does it try to ‘think’.

We usually complain about systems ‘getting in our way’, with arbitrary criteria that determine success. But this goes the other way too. Much of my success and that of those around me is similarly mechanical. Not luck, effort, or nepotism.

The nervous system teaches us the most important lesson about human behaviour: the main thing our body does is transform the world into adaptive responses, and the nervous system is at the very core of it. But beyond that, it’s mostly just a mess.

Many cognitive biases seem like they can be boiled down to a handful of fundamental beliefs, and then belief-consistent information processing (i.e. confirmation bias).