The perils of cognitive efficiency.

To navigate the world we have to simplify the torrent of sensations that arrive at our senses, to form perceptions of how the world works, and act upon them. 

We tend to make familiar things in to functional chunks where we don't think through every process involved, and that allows a lot of short cuts.

At the simplest level, we intuit that the physical world is consistent, so the ball coming towards us will fly on a predictable trajectory. Watching kids learn to catch will show you how we develop that idea of stability, that our minds are plastic enough to adapt to new circumstances, and that we develop 'chunks' of activity or thought that we don't need to think about: they've become automatic.

In the slipperier, variable world of decision making, and we also chunk and take short cuts, but this isn't too much of a problem it we are aware of our predisposition. Indeed, there is a branch of the behavioural sciences devoted to the examination of our baked-in biasses and includes disciplines like behavioural economics.

What is a problem is when we make decisions in ignorance of our fallibility, be it from simple or willful ignorance,

Some more specific pieces will follow on some of the more notable cognitive traps we fall in to.