Saved by Maurice Cronin and
100 Little Ideas
Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Anscombe’s Quartet : Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
McNamara Fallacy : A belief that rational decisions can be made with quantitative measures alone, when in fact the things you can’t measure are often the most consequential. Named after Defense Secretary McNamara, who tried to quantify every aspect of the Vietnam War.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Impostor Syndrome : Fear of being exposed as less talented than people think you are, often because talent is owed to cumulative advantage rather than actual effort or skill.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Luxury Paradox : The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighbor... See more
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Compassion Fade : People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
System Justification Theory : Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Planck’s Principle : “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Apophenia : A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.