A cognitive bias is a strong, preconceived notion of someone or something that's based on information we have, perceive to have, or lack. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts the human brain produces to expedite information processing - to quickly help it make sense of what it is seeing. There are [hundreds of cognitive biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases), but learning them might not be as helpful as we hope for [[Making decisions]]. Biases are great at explaining why we make mistakes in hindsight, but are not effective at preventing us from making mistakes in real-time. We may think a checklist of cognitive biases will prevent us from making bad decisions, but we are incredibly good at keeping biases as blind spots. Simply put, we don't believe they apply to us. The source of all cognitive biases is the "meta bias" - that it's hard to see a system that we're a part of. The key to making fewer mistakes is through adapting [[Mental model]]s and seeing problems through different frames of reference that takes us outside the problem to start getting into a [[Subject-object relationship]] with the problem, which helps alleviate the meta bias.