Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet: Thinking is hard because of 4 universal conundrums

@buster did this excellent categorization, and someone else turned it into this cool diagram that I want to print out and hang on my wall.

Just a few of the many biases on here that really affect indie hackers:

• Confirmation bias — disproportionately focusing on evidence that confirms our beliefs. We do this all the time. When talking to customers, instead of seeking the cold hard truth, we subtly coax people into telling us our ideas are good. When doing research, instead of seeking disconfirming evidence and identifying potential hurdles, we look for proof that our ideas will work.
• Hyperbolic discounting (aka present-bias) — valuing immediate payoffs way more than later payoffs. We tend to prioritize the easy, fun parts of being indie hackers, and we put off the more unpleasant tasks even when they clearly pay off well in the future.
• Choice-supportive bias (aka post-purchase rationalization) — ignoring the faults and playing up the benefits of the choices we make. As founders, it's easy to make a choice about a product/market/strategy, rationalize it as a great choice, and then get locked into continuing with it without evaluating alternatives.
• Self-serving bias — the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. We're very quick to construct stories for why we succeed, while attributing our failures and other people's successes to luck.
• IKEA effect — over-valuing the things we assemble with our own hands, regardless of the actual quality. Put simply, we tend to love the things we build more than others do, and are often surprised when they don't.
• Curse of knowledge — difficulty thinking about problems from the perspective of people who know less than us. Many of our landing pages fail to communicate the necessary information to visitors, because we falsely assume they know what we know.
• Hard–easy effect — overestimating one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimating one's ability to accomplish easy tasks. How many of us drastically overestimate what we can build in a short period of time, and completely neglect to create a minimum viable product? How few of us drastically underestimate the results of doing small simple tasks daily over a long time period?
• Planning fallacy — underestimating task completion times. This one speaks for itself!