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 hindsight bias, people who know the outcome of a situation believe the outcome should have been easy to predict in advance.

Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality

hindsight 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

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable. When we say, “I should have known that would happen,” or, “I should have seen it coming,” we are succumbing to hindsight bias.

Annie Duke • Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

hindsight bias

In psychology, the Ovsiankina effect describes the innate human urge to finish tasks we've initiated. This tendency to resume an interrupted action is especially prevalent when the action hasn't yet been achieved.[1] The effect is named after Maria Ovsiankina, who conducted research on this behavior.

Maria Ovsiankina • Ovsiankina effect

Ovsiankina effect

The term “cognitive biases” is arguably misleading in that it suggests that believing truth would be a kind of default. Arguably, it’s amazing that we manage to believe the truth at all. If you want your beliefs to be accurate, you’re constantly swimming against your own biology and instincts.Broadly speaking, I think we can identify three reasons... See more

dynomight • Effectiveness beats accuracy

If you want your beliefs to be accurate, you’re constantly swimming against your own biology and instincts.

A Rube Goldberg machine , named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.

Rube Goldberg machine

“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

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment.6 Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot,7

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

escalation of commitment

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.”

Taylor Jenkins Reid • One True Loves

Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon