Saved by Anna B and
The Dangers of Apophenia: Not Everything Happens for a Reason
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.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
For all the benefits of visual puzzles, there’s a danger. A big one. It’s the aforementioned apophenia, the tendency to see hidden things that are not there, to find a nonexistent pattern in the noise.
A.J. Jacobs • The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life
Coincidences are in most cases a mental phenomenon: the patterns exist in the mind, not in the world.
Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Why Our Belief Systems Create Misperceptions- Published in The European, Nov 2014
Rivahardtowrite.com
Stuart Evans and added
The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our mental and emotional orientation to them, so the moment we dismiss it, we pinch off any further experience. The placebo effect, confirmation bias, and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon are actually the b... See more
Sadalsuud • It's Called "Woo" Because It's Fun
collective thinking behaviors are treated as epiphenomena at best, and pathologies at worst.
Substack • Graph Minds
Keely Adler added
We humans are rationalization machines. We are great at finding patterns where none exist. There’s a term in psychology called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, which is named for the rifleman who shot up the side of a barn and then painted a target to fit the bullet holes. It’s a trait that can have great results (crafting an uplifting narrative out
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