New Year’s Listicle: Top 2 Cognitive Biases

More world-premiere animated shorts! Plus: State Of The Newsletter Address.

Happy Twilight of the Holiday Season! NZN is ringing in the new year with two more world-premiere short animated videos, followed by some thoughts about the future evolution of this newsletter. 

Each of these videos is about a cognitive bias (and both videos are, like the previous two, collaborations between me and Nikita Petrov). Plot spoiler considerations prevent me from saying more, except for this tantalizing clue: One of these cognitive biases is justly famous and one is unjustly not-so-famous (though I’ve been doing my best to make it better known!)—and the two of them can work in synergy to highly destructive effect. 

1) The justly famous one:

2) The unjustly not-so-famous one:

These videos are a good segue to my much-anticipated State Of The Newsletter Address (which you’re now reading, regardless of whether you much anticipated it). The cognitive biases they describe, after all, are important drivers of “the psychology of tribalism”—and the psychology of tribalism, if left unchecked, could help push the planet into a downward spiral of exactly the kind (i.e. cataclysmic) that this newsletter is in favor of preventing and that this newsletter (in its higher serotonin moments) even hopes to help prevent.