Almost every decision we make is determined, in part, by our cognitive biases.  The smart person makes sure that, to the best of their ability, those biases are consciously and honestly analyzed whenever making a decision.  It is a shame that we do not learn about known cognitive biases in school at a young age.

That’s all well and good, but how do you defend against biases that are almost impossible to recognize?  Take charitable giving, for example.  It turns out that people are much more likely to donate money to disaster relief efforts for hurricanes when the first letter of the hurricane name matches our own.  Mind blown.

The beautiful thing about cognitive biases, though, is that we all have them and, thus, can manipulate people using them. (Oh, wait, no, that’s the horrible thing about them.)  This is why I am proposing that all hurricanes start with the letter ‘J’.  ‘J’ is the most common first letter for names in America.  This should allow for the maximum of charitable giving to occur.  At least until everyone whose name begins with ‘J’ ends up bankrupt because of all of their charitable giving.  Then we can move on the hurricanes that begin with ‘M’.

When technology progresses to a point when information from the interwebs is directly fed into our brains, I propose that hurricane names be tailored to the individual.  Any news we consume about the hurricane will automatically fill in our name for the hurricane name.  Donations will pour in faster than water from the broken levees caused by hurricane <insert your name here>!