Binary Bias

The mind is asked to place people on a scale from shy to bold, honest to crooked, us to them. Watch what it does: it takes the smooth scale and snaps it into two boxes.

This is the bias — a taste for either/or. Continuous reality is expensive to carry; a mind running on limited fuel prefers the cheap storage of categories. So spectrums become switches: good or bad, friend or enemy, success or failure.

The cost is everything that lives in the middle, which is to say, most of life. The moderately honest man, the partly good idea, the sixty-percent friend — the binary mind has no shelf for them, so it files them wrongly.

The discipline is to hear yourself say "So is it X or Y?" and answer, deliberately, "It is Tuesday, and about sixty percent X." Reality is analog. Only the filing cabinet is digital.