Two more that’re a bit Sequences-esque but which I like so much and use so often I’ll highlight them anyway:
Reference class forecasting. It doesn’t just help one beat the planning fallacy by predicting durations; it can predict probabilities too, and one can apply it to other people as well. Will a flaky friend show up to a meal? Run a reference class forecast. Am I likely to get a “yes” if I ask someone for such & such a favour? Run a reference class forecast. How likely is it that a claim an acquaintance has just made is true? You get the idea. (Guess I should throw in reference class tennisas well. Fortunately, just as with actual tennis, it’s hard to play reference class tennis on my own, so reference class tennis isn’t too big a risk when I do solo reference class forecasts.)
The typical mind fallacy, which I deliberately use as a heuristic. If I’m trying to explain someone else’s behaviour (or figure out an aspect of someone else’s psychology more generally), I use myself as a model and ask myself why I might do the same thing. This may give an incorrect answer, but it gets me an answer faster than trying to derive someone else’s behaviour from first principles, and I can always introspect further to guess how well my self-derived answer might generalize to others.
Statistics: skewness (and medians as outlier-&-skew-resistant averages), standard error (and error bars more generally), systematic error vs. random error, effect size, power, meta-analysis, bootstrapping & Monte Carlo methods, sampling methods.
Now you prompt me to reflect on it: yes, I effectively am. The bias with no name is just a special case of the availability heuristic, but it’s sufficiently common/salient in my experience that my mind’s tacitly upgraded it to the status of a free-standing concept.
Extracting examples from some of my past comments: proving too much, selection bias, Nash equilibrium, denotation & connotation, insight & intuition as recognition.
Others from game theory & economics: free riders & hold outs, the tragedies of the commons & the anticommons, precommitment, coordination games, average-marginal confusion, thinking at the margin.
Two more that’re a bit Sequences-esque but which I like so much and use so often I’ll highlight them anyway:
Reference class forecasting. It doesn’t just help one beat the planning fallacy by predicting durations; it can predict probabilities too, and one can apply it to other people as well. Will a flaky friend show up to a meal? Run a reference class forecast. Am I likely to get a “yes” if I ask someone for such & such a favour? Run a reference class forecast. How likely is it that a claim an acquaintance has just made is true? You get the idea. (Guess I should throw in reference class tennis as well. Fortunately, just as with actual tennis, it’s hard to play reference class tennis on my own, so reference class tennis isn’t too big a risk when I do solo reference class forecasts.)
The typical mind fallacy, which I deliberately use as a heuristic. If I’m trying to explain someone else’s behaviour (or figure out an aspect of someone else’s psychology more generally), I use myself as a model and ask myself why I might do the same thing. This may give an incorrect answer, but it gets me an answer faster than trying to derive someone else’s behaviour from first principles, and I can always introspect further to guess how well my self-derived answer might generalize to others.
Slightly less well-known cognitive biases: just world fallacy, mean world syndrome, and that one bias that really needs a name where people underestimate mundane risks and overestimate dramatic risks.
Statistics: skewness (and medians as outlier-&-skew-resistant averages), standard error (and error bars more generally), systematic error vs. random error, effect size, power, meta-analysis, bootstrapping & Monte Carlo methods, sampling methods.
Are you distinguishing between this phenomenon and the availability heuristic?
Now you prompt me to reflect on it: yes, I effectively am. The bias with no name is just a special case of the availability heuristic, but it’s sufficiently common/salient in my experience that my mind’s tacitly upgraded it to the status of a free-standing concept.