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

100 Little Ideas

Morgan Housel collabfund.com

All people are flawed, a mix of good and bad, but we tend to see others as only one thing. The philosopher Amartya Sen calls this a “solitarist” approach to identity. And as we are biased toward negativity — a bad apple spoils the bunch — we are thrown off by a person’s bad character traits or past actions. Even minor ones. We identify people by... See more

Tim Gorichanaz • Finding Heroes In A Messy Digital World | NOEMA

We identify people by the worst thing they’ve ever done.

A heuristic (/hjʊˈrɪstɪk/; from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω ( heurískō ) 'method of discovery' [1]) or heuristic technique ( problem solving , mental shortcut , rule of thumb )[2][3][4][5] is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an app... See more

en.wikipedia.org • Heuristic - Wikipedia

Part of the problem is cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers:10 we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.

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

Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.

thekcpgroup.com • The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

confirmation bias

Best practices are rarely the best — they're mostly just cargo cult common practices.

And as more people adopt them, the more mediocre they become.

The best is usually what most people aren't willing to do.

Jason Fried • Tweet

cargo cult

Utility maximization was first developed by utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In microeconomics, the utility maximization problem is the problem consumers face: "How should I spend my money in order to maximize my utility?" It is a type of optimal decision problem. It consists of choosing how much of each available good... See more

Jonothan Levin • Utility maximization problem

Dogma , in its broadest sense, is any belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism,[1] or Islam, as well as the positions of a philosopher or of a philosophical school, such as Stoicism.

It may also... See more

Simon Blackburn • Dogma

The converse of the halo effect is the horns effect: All perceived negative qualities correlate. If Stalin is evil, then everything he says should be false. You wouldn’t want to agree with Stalin, would you?

Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality

halo effect vs horns effect