WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is)

Concept Search related

A cognitive principle from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): System 1 (fast, intuitive) operates only on the information it currently has — it does not represent absence, missing features, or unknown unknowns. The mind treats the visible features as the complete set.

Sutherland (2022) argues WYSIATI is the mechanism behind New-is-better bias: when comparing new vs. old, the new's differentiators are salient and tickable; the old's differentiators (and the new's missing features) are invisible. WYSIATI completes the picture, and the picture is wrong.

The bias is harder to detect than most because the mind feels like it has considered the full picture. The WYSIATI insight is that the feeling of "I have considered it all" is itself the trap.

The acronym is a useful summary of the failure mode: what you see is all there is, because the cognitive system that does the evaluating cannot represent what it doesn't see.

How it's structured

  1. Definition A cognitive principle from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): **System 1 (fast, intuitive) operates only on the information…
  2. Definition The acronym is a useful summary of the failure mode: what you see is all there is, because the cognitive system that does the evaluating c…
  3. Mechanism System 1 constructs a "coherent story" from available information and acts on it without flagging what is missing. This produces:
  4. Mechanism The bias is harder to detect than most because the mind feels like it has considered the full picture. The WYSIATI insight is that the fee…
  5. Application to New-is-Better Bias Sutherland (2022) argues WYSIATI is the mechanism behind New-is-better bias: when comparing new vs. old, the new's *differ…
  6. Application to New-is-Better Bias The cure is forced consideration of the absent — the diagnostic tests for that bias ar…

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