While I think it's good for pedagogical purposes to have a catalogue of many examples of where our thinking goes wrong, I worry that these lists can give off th

While I think it's good for pedagogical purposes to have a catalogue of many examples of where our thinking goes wrong, I worry that these lists can give off the wrong idea that our thinking is broken in so many "different" ways. In some sense, many of these biases seem like specific instances of a more general phenomenon. For example, illusion of control and pareidolia both seem like they'd arise if you buy into the brain as doing [predictive processing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...). So it's not exactly that we have over 100 ways that our thinking goes wrong, but that the same types of mistakes occur in different ways. In which case, for preventative reasons, knowing the core mechanism at play seems much more important. Similarly, I feel that lists of mental models might also be missing the point; no one can really go through a list of 100+ items to figure out which one is at play. You're going to need a smaller, more general toolkit.