Cognitive blind spots
Cognitive blind spots are undermining our ability to see the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.
At the start of the 21st century, western elites generally assumed that globalisation, democracy and the free market were self-evidently good, and would keep spreading, creating peace. No longer.
FIS, Swiss Federal Intelligence Service, has published a manual about cognitive blind spots.
18 different cognitive biases that hamper our thinking, such as
“group think” (adhering to the cosy assumptions of our tribe),
“anchoring” (relying exclusively on whatever information we see first, say on social media),
“confirmation bias” (only seeing data that reinforces pre-existing views),
“mirror imaging” (assuming others think like us),
“absence of evidence” bias (failing to think about the data we lack)
and “survivorship bias” (judging data only with success stories, not failures).
Gillian Tett Financial Times 2 January 2026
https://www.ft.com/content/d8b26855-c6d8-4d76-b9f2-663e90548d6c
On Thursday August 9 2007, financial markets suddenly seized up.
Since I was running the Financial Times markets team, I spent two days frantically trying to identify the reason for the panic. Nobody knew. But that weekend I suddenly woke in the middle of the night with an image of a Spanish bin (papperskorg) in my head.
A month earlier I had attended a credit conference in Barcelona, where I read brochures about a little-known, and supposedly safe, entity known as a “structured investment vehicle”.
The material had seemed achingly dull. So on the way home I tossed the papers into an airport bin — and forgot it.
Gillian Tett FT 10 August 2017
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/03/on-thursday-august-9-2007-financial.html
Gillian Tett is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Financial Times. She writes a weekly column on Friday, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She also serves as Provost of King's College, Cambridge.
Previously, she chaired the FT editorial board, ran Moral Money, the FT's sustainability newsletter which she co-founded, and wrote two columns a week. Gillian's earlier roles included US managing editor for the FT; assistant editor; capital markets editor; deputy editor of the Lex column; Tokyo bureau chief; reporter in Russia and Brussels.
She has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009) and Business Journalist of the Year (2008) in the British Press Awards, and received three awards from America's Society of Business and Economic Writers Awards.
She is a best-selling and award-winning author of four books, and received the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award and the American Anthropological Association President Medal for her work in social science. She has received honorary degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Miami and Baruch universities in America, and Exeter, Lancaster, Goldsmith's, London in the UK.
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