A little over a year ago, I stumbled on a book called The Art of Thinking Clealry. To say I was hooked is a understatement. Rolf Dobelli's austere sense of humor and trademark German bluntness make this hard to put down. You'll find yourself wanting to reach his nugget of wisdom at the end of each chapter, take your dopamine hit, and flip the page to learn how you've managed to fool yourself another way.
Dobelli never intended to publish his personal checklist of rationality bugs; he wanted to use them as tool for self reflection and to catch himself when he easily — and sometimes eagerly — wandered into one of these biases. Similarly, I never intended to document running into these traps myself — but, then I wanted to learn a new framekwork. So, here we all are.
I know myself (to a certain degree) and, if you're anything like me, you also know that Richard Feynman's first principle of learning is the most important:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
So, welcome to a structured framework of all the ways I've fooled myself as an engineer. Visit the heuristics to learn from my mistakes, but know that you'll probably have to learn these lessons yourself as well.