Mental Models

The region-beta paradox describes the phenomenon whereby, sometimes, a person may benefit from being worse off versus just mildly off, because being worse off may mobilize them to take action to address the problem, whereas being mildly off can lead them to stagnancy.

One of the stupidest things I’ve repeatedly seen smart people do – I call this Advanced Stupid – is that they get so fixated on trying to optimize something complicated, that they forget to optimize for survival, and then they get knocked out of the game. Like having a startup trying to do something complicatedly clever, and then running out of mon

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