Debugging the Mind: A Programmer's Guide to Critical Thinking
summary
Examples and concrete failures expose what to watch: cognitive traps like confirmation bias and anchoring show up in unit tests, planning and hiring; popularity-driven choices (React, Kubernetes, Hadoop) lead to over‑engineering; the WWII plane map illustrates survivorship bias; a real bug is traced to 3‑D Secure rejecting 30‑bit colourDepth (Chrome reports true 30-bit displays, EMVCo copied W3Schools’ enumerated values), causing payments to fail until specs and implementations accept other values. Practical fixes, tests and source checks are foregrounded.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:57Thatcher illusion and brain bugs
- 5:42Cognitive biases in dev
- 6:47Confirmation bias and unit tests
- 9:40Works on my machine
- 10:27Appeal to popularity in stacks
- 13:34Anchoring in sprints and reviews
- 17:31Survivorship bias in decisions
- 21:50Critical thinking for the brain
- 25:06Critical thinking with loop optimizations
- 27:33Debugging 30-bit color bug
- 32:37Critical thinking in engineering
- 33:22Question one assumption
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