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

Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency. A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. No one who’s driven home drunk has woken up the next day and seen it as a good decision just because they d

blinkist.com • Thinking in Bets Overview

There’s a less obvious force that clouds our vision of our abilities: a deficit in metacognitive skill, the ability to think about our thinking. Lacking competence can leave us blind to our own incompetence.

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

For hundreds of years, “Occam’s razor” has been a go-to in any critical thinker’s mental toolbox. Also known as the “principle of parsimony,” this heuristic (read: a mental shortcut) is often summarized as: “When you have two competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simpler one is the better.”

Kevin Dickinson • 3 brilliant critical thinking tools used by Daniel Dennett

It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the world works.

Andrea Zittel • Andrea Zittel, "These Things I Know for Sure"

We are currently trapped in the illusion of growth. The belief that all businesses should grow indefinitely. To expand their business, profits, and workforce… Everything in nature is circular, so there’s nothing natural about this growth craze.

Angelos Arnis • Designing for the last earth

Zero-risk bias is a tendency to prefer the complete elimination of risk in a sub-part over alternatives with greater overall risk reduction.[1] It often manifests in cases where decision makers address problems concerning health, safety, and the environment.[2] Its effect on decision making has been observed in surveys presenting hypothetical scena... See more

Daniel Crosby • Zero-risk bias

several studies have found that even knowing there’s a wealth of (seemingly) reliable information available 24/7 at our fingertips makes us less likely to store new knowledge in our own memory since we can just ‘look it up’ when needed. This is the so-called ‘Google Effect.’

How Too Much Information Can Make Us Stupid and Miserable

‘Google 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.

I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.

A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me know