mind traps

“In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life (...) we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”

from Think Again by Adam Grant

baja

In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.

Adam Grant • Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart

Jonathan Haidt • The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

The planning fallacy describes our natural bias when forecasting our own productivity: we focus on the best-case scenario, or something dangerously close to it. Rarely does that scenario play out.

David Epstein • Why You Should Plan To Get Less Done

planning fallacy

Paul Venuto • feed updates

Publication bias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientific literature is full of positive results. Null or negative results have traditionally been hard to publish and are often relegated to abandoned hard drives, despite the fact that they represent valuable knowledge claims. Research users looking for evidence get a distorted view, which — like... See more

An “Omics” Answer to the Replication Crisis

publication bias

“If you can’t decide, pretend you’re deciding for a friend.” Solomon’s paradox is a robust finding that we're better at solving other people's problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity. But research has found that viewing oneself in the 3rd person yields the same detachment and objectivity. So if... See more

the paradox of choice

Sunk Cost Fallacy: The most common way in which people plan vacations is to decide where and when they want to travel, and only later do they consider the fares. (More on the fallacy of this approach and a superior strategy in Chapter 3.) Once we’ve mentally committed ourselves to a specific trip, not going or going somewhere else doesn’t feel like

Scott Keyes • Take More Vacations: How to Search Better, Book Cheaper, and Travel the World

Woke opinions are popular for several reasons. For a start, they lift a great burden from the brain; there’s no need to understand a complex world if you can just blame everything on bigotry.

The Opinion Pageant

Steel Man Technique. Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it. It’s being charitable and patching up the weaknesses in the other side’s proposition so that he can bring the best counter-argument to your point of view.

It’s a simple idea, but incredibly difficult in practice. Most of the time... See more

Louis Chew • The Steel Man Technique: How To Argue Better And Be More Persuasive

Steel Man technique and why it is hard to apply