System 1 and System 2 Thinking; Part 6

The 3 Distortions: How You Miscalculate Risk

Cognitive errors are neither random nor failures of intellect. They are features of how your mind is built.

The Availability Heuristic

We judge probability by how easily an example comes to mind. Vivid instances feel more plausible; the leg lock that caught you last week looms larger than the choke you escaped.

The effects are predictable. You abandon a new guard because a couple of sweeps got stuffed. Yet, you return to a low % technique because of that one time it worked.

The Representativeness Heuristic

Grapplers are pattern matchers by necessity. Representativeness is what happens when pattern-matching substitutes for probability.

It shapes how you read others. The athletic get filed as dangerous. The small are filed as manageable. Neither read is necessarily wrong, but both are based on resemblance rather than evidence. The explosive beginner who moves like a wrestler is not an experienced wrestler. The small training partner with a decade on the mat is not manageable by default.

It also distorts how you evaluate yourself. Subtle progress rarely feels like progress, so you don't register it, and you conclude you're stagnating.

Anchoring and Adjustment

We anchor to an initial impression when making subsequent judgments. Adjustment; the attempt to correct away from that anchor, is almost always insufficient.

Early judgments anchor hard. The person who tapped you constantly in the beginning still feels perilous, long after your game has moved on. The inverse holds equally: someone you used to dominate gets put in a box, long after your superiority stopped being true.

The same pattern shapes how you evaluate technique. An approach drilled early under a trusted instructor becomes the reference point against which everything else is measured. Variants feel suspect. You may roll with someone whose approach is demonstrably more effective and remain anchored to the inferior version anyway.

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These systems are difficult to influence because they happen below conscious thought, and correction requires deliberate habits and practices that introduce the kind of thinking System 1 cannot do on its own.