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This Is the Single Most Important Page on the Web (If You’re a Human)

Cognitive biases shape us beautifully and tragically

Hunter Walk
OneZero
3 min readJan 25, 2021

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Photo by Damian Zaleski on Unsplash

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.

Image: Wikipedia’s cognitive biases page

“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…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Hunter Walk
Hunter Walk

Written by Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

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