Somebody should write an “encyclopedia of copes and rationalizations”
Copes and rationalizations are both much more interesting and I think more analytically sound mental models than “biases”
“Cognitive biases” is the most overrated idea I’ve ever encountered. Like everyone else I was impressed when I first encountered them in ~2005. Now I think they are ontologically ill-posed, not-even-wrong in terms of analytical “insights” and cancerous as normative scaffolding.
Things tagged as copes and rationalizations don’t pretend to be anything more than they are — little narrative patterns that form a folksonomy of revealing cognitive tendencies. No shady “experimental” evidence and claims of statistical significance. Just literary observations.
Around January 2008, I wrote what now seems like an embarrassingly gushy fanboi review of the cognitive-biases pop lit. But I think that’s also around the time I started turning sharply skeptical.
By the time I began writing Tempo in 2009-2011, I was already fully skeptical, but I didn’t want to pick fights I couldn’t win. So I kinda pulled my punches and wrote a tepid rejection in defending my own narrative rationality model, which is in direct contradiction to biasology
If I were writing tempo today, I wouldn’t pull my punches. I’m not a polemicist by nature so I wouldn’t attempt to tear it down, but I’d reject it firmly, no punches pulled, and openly declare my thing as a conflicting conceptualization of the same phenomenology
I recommended picking beefs as a way to bootstrap a an indie consulting career, but I don’t recommend it as a way to bootstrap a writing career. You want to build energy around exploring a generative vein you discover, not burn yourself up fighting an idea space you dislike.
I’m still ambivalent about this advice even for indie consulting. Beefs are just such a toxic thing to bring into your life. (Before anyone bugs me again… no this isn’t online anywhere, and yes the ebook is still in production)
Not necessarily. Often all we have is copes and rationalizations, and no way to know a meaningful "ground" truth. Are "religion" and "atheism" biases about the afterlife? Both are obviously copes/rationalizations concerning mortality, but it seems silly to call them biases