This Is the Single Most Important Page on the Web (If You’re a Human)
Cognitive biases shape us beautifully and tragically
If you could only access a single URL on the web, what would it be? Not something like Google or YouTube but actually a single static url — so youtube.com/[some specific video]. I was thinking about this earlier today, and my initial framing was, “What page performs the most complex task that I couldn’t do myself?”—imagining that optimizing for absolute computing power would be the right angle. It took me a minute or two, but I realized this was completely backward and that I should be trying to figure out what content would be most impactful upon a different type of computing power, namely my own brain.
That flip led me back to a page that I absolutely love and try to visit quarterly or so when I want to laugh at myself: Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases.
“A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the…
