mind traps

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.”

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

Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.[1]

Limitations include the difficulty of the problem requiring a decision, the cognitive capability of the mind, and the time available to... See more

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.

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.