What is cognitive distortion?

Cognitive distortion is a concept in personal epistemology: What you perceive is a construction, not a recording. Your brain generates a model of reality shaped by expectation, culture, and attention — and it feels like truth precisely because the construction is invisible to you.

Example: Two engineers review the same production dashboard after an outage. One sees confirmation that the new microservices architecture was a mistake — she was against the migration from the start. The other sees evidence that the monitoring layer needs work — he championed the migration and believes the architecture is sound. Same data. Same screen. Two different realities constructed by two different sets of prior beliefs. Neither engineer is lying or stupid. Both are perceiving through models they did not choose and cannot see. Until they externalize their interpretations and compare them against each other and the raw data, each will believe they are simply reading the dashboard objectively.

This concept is part of Phase 8 (Perceptual Calibration) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perceptual calibration.