A is for Book
When our eldest daughter was first learning colors from a Scooby Doo color book, she accidentally encoded “hat” for “yellow” because the picture in the book was of a yellow hat. “What color is a banana?” we’d ask.
She’d respond, “hat.”
Something similar but a bit more advanced is happening with our son. He is learning the alphabet and letter sounds but the rule for a song on the alphabet hasn’t fully been mastered. The first goes something like this:
“A is for apple… a.. a.. apple”
Now, it’s supposed to repeat for different letters of the alphabet and words that start with that letter.
“B is for book… b.. b.. book”
However, every line the song starts with a “A” and every word has the article “a”. So, the logic still holds. “A is for book… a… a.. book” or “A is for giraffe…a… a.. giraffe.”
This istantly reminded me of how I used to program in university. There would be some type of recursive subroutine that had an error and I would have to spend hours trying to figure out where it was. Maybe that script didn’t have the write permissions to run? Oh no, “A” is for bug… a a bug.”
Cognitive biases are the grown up versio of my son’s little song or my attempt at programming in university. We seem to think we’re right when we’re constantly failing in our logic. As adults, sometimes it’s the honest friend who can point these out, be our error checker, and say “hey… slow down a little.”
