Whether we’re arguing the impacts of downtown development or trying to make sense of the new world financial crisis, the following list of perceptual human biases, written about in Taleb’s Black Swan and summarized here by David Brooks, always seem to shine through…

[Nassim Nicholas] Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

Maybe that’s a big part of the reason why the random party-goer who speaks only in absolutes is always the most suspect in my book.  Unfortunately for you, that kind of self-doubt doesn’t usually make for the most entertaining blog.